Today’s update… I believe I am on day 3 or 4 of my Alexa-based delayed no motion detected routine working even with reboots and changes to the delay timing. Do I trust it is fixed? No, I’m just lucky for the time-being (especially with others still having the same issue). I don’t believe I have done anything different than others (i.e. physical restart, remove/re-add Wyze skill to alexa, setup new routine, etc.). Of course, such intervention should never be necessary as smart devices should be smart enough to auto-recover when there are cloud-based and/or other types of outages/failures.
This discussion thread is over a month old with no comments from Wyze personnel and more people joining the thread indicating the same and/or similar issues. It is technology-based and while things do happen, it is bad when a company doesn’t respond. I understand that this community thread may not be completely monitored, but it would be prudent of a company to do such to obtain unsolicited feedback, reports of issues, etc. If a vendor isn’t going to monitor and provide feedback/guidance, then why have a community thread?).
A couple years ago I returned several of my Wemo smart plugs to Costco (donated what I could not return) for continued outages that made routines stop working (a lot of wasted time trying to get something to work that obviously wasn’t going to ever work consistently). I once saw a woman start looking at Wemo smart plug inside a Costco and told her that the Wemo devices were problematic, difficult to set up (they may have improved that now), and had issues with working consistency. I also told her that Kasa smart plugs work much better, are easier to set up, and go on-sale on Amazon fairly often.
I recently had another smart appliance (air purifier) acting up where the Google/Alexa-based routines stopped working. I waiting a couple weeks to see if it would automatically get fixed (because I would like to think that smart device vendors have various alerts configured to notify them when something breaks or is misbehaving) and sent the vendor an email asking if they were aware of apparent issues with their Alexa and Google skill/integrations. They indicated they were not and said they were going to look into it and get back to me. I waited a couple weeks and sent another email asking forma status. They replied shortly after I sent the 2nd email that the issue was just fixed and to try it again. I did have to reset things before they started working (waiting a little longer after being notify a fix was implemented may have made things work automatically).
My concern over the reliability of Wyze sensors (and perhaps other Wyze devices) is growing. Things that add convenience (i.e. a camera to notify and see a package at the front door, a notification that the freezer door was left open after 10 minutes, turning a light on/off when a door is opened/closed) maybe don’t require 99.999% uptime. However, things are very different if you live in a neighborhood with lots of porch pirates (people stealing delivered packages), have an entire freezer full of food thaw because the door was left opened accidentally, rely on technologies to enhance security/safety (i.e. lights, door locks, garage doors, etc.), etc. It is one thing to lose convenience when technologies fail, but it is another thing to lose security/safety because the technologies you have don’t consistently work.
I am still hoping that this issue can be resolved soon (less than another 30 days). If not, I will just have to assume that while Wyze devices offer convenience, they don’t have the reliability for security/safety applications and the convenience factors may periodically be intermittent.
Note: I recently started paying a monthly subscription for Wyze Camera person detection (more than the minimum suggested for all my cameras… I started with Wyze during a timeframe when they indicated that person detection would be free, but I do understand the recurring costs involved with doing person detection).