I was an early adopter when I fell for Wyze marketing. They appeared to be a diverse group of young, passionate tech geniuses that got together and decided that they could make a better camera for cheaper. And sure enough they came out with the Wyze cam for 25$. It was hi-def, good picture quality, but had a buggy app and no desktop access. Then came the CamPan which was a taller version of their cute little square camera that had a servo in it that let it swivel back and forth 270% or something.
I bought 5 of the small cubes and 2 of the panning cameras. I had them all over my house and even got a waterproof 3rd party enclosure for the outside. I was so pleased with the fact that they had 2 way audio that I got rid of all of the ring devices I had purchased.
But something happened. Suddenly the cameras were never online. Then there were problems with the firmware. Sometimes the cameras would show up but they’d have previews from the last time you used them (still a problem today). The software never quite worked and all of this was okay because they were a rag-tag team of kids that you just wanted to cheer on.
The truth is that we don’t even know if any of the people in their marketing video were actually employees of Wyze. What’s clear is that the hardware and software were made in China. The firmware was maintained in China and several users were noticing a lot of traffic between China and their Wyze cams.
Of course, when asked about it, Wyze denied that China had anything to do with it, but the fears lingered. Suddenly, the firmware renamed several of the devices and they began downloading updates from a proxy in the US. It was still coming from China, but it looked like they had switched to US servers.
Still the cameras were terrible about storing information. I would regularly lose recordings that were either auto captured or manually recorded. Just disappear of my memory card entirely.
Often the little SD Cards would just stop working. It has been a mess from day one, but it was worth it because, after all, they were some young upstart Americans with diverse backgrounds that marketing kept shoving down our throats.
Support for the cameras has always been abysmal and mostly required group help from the forums. Their website to this day is ridiculous to navigate and now they have so many products that there is just no way to think if them as a rag-tag group of struggling tech geniuses barely scraping enough profit to get by.
They started announcing everything from an automated enema bag to a brain implant and matching brainwashing glasses. The line of products they produce now has entire destroyed any credibility they have and yet people are still enamoured by their marketing campaign. They release new products that aren’t ready for market and make you wait 16 months to get them after you have paid for them. Explanations are always something fabulous like, Oh we found that on occasion the bezel on the watch failed to reflect your full countenance, so we had to re-engineer this ridiculous watch.
It looks enough like a bulky Apple Watch first gen, but it has the worst UI Ever. Not only is it just plain ugly, it’s hard to use and it requires a stupid custom magnetic cable that is hard to distinguish from the pile of other stupid cables you collect from other ridiculous devices that have custom cables. I lost mine the first week after waiting nearly 2 years to get watch in pre-order. It’s supposed to have features like oxygen levels, but the interface is just so crappy I can’t even bare to look at it let alone be caught wearing it. The watch faces are so bad that Fisher Price would be a significant upgrade. I honestly can’t believe how bad the watch is. I wouldn’t give it to someone I didn’t like it’s that bad. I know, I know, what can you expect for $20? It’s a piece of shit and you knew it when you spent $20 for it.
But in true Capitalist form, the Wyze team decided that rather than making a windows or mac interface for the cameras, they would start developing all of these other shitty products. But then they introduced CampPlus, so they could milk money out of us on subscription. Originally it had all of these great features but none of them really worked. Eventually, some worked, but not consistently. Often, the camera I had signed up for Cam Plus just wouldn’t work. If I put an SD card in it, it would complain. So I had to rely on their web-storage of my camera footage. It has been terrible since day 1.
Then they came out with Cam Plus Pro but it’s obvious they fired their marketing team because it never made any sense. The pro version was supposed to identify people which the Plus version was supposed to originally as well. Just another way to milk money from you.
Then AWS lost all of our data.
The on December 15, right in front of my Wyze camera outdoors, about a dozen cop cars chase a man into our parking lot, get out of their cars and chase him into our back yard and under our deck. Then out in the open where IMMEDIATELY in front of my Wyze Cam, they taser the fuck out of the guy. Wyze got none of it. Not a single fucking second. AWS apparently went down.
Now today, I get a message from the guy’s defense team asking for the footage and I can’t provide it. That’s shitty. This was Wyze’s opportunity to shine and they failed again. Wyze is a piece of shit company that produces crappy cheap equipment and provides terrible and absolutely unreliable service for a monthly charge. Absolutely anybody but Wyze would have caught that footage without a problem.
I can no longer rely on Wyze for any service or piece of hardware. They have let me down over and over and they suck. Today, because they outsourced all of their tech support to the Philippines, they closed tech support because of the super Typhoon. It is too difficult to figure out that you should have 24 hour tech support by distributing your support staff around the globe so someone can always help. No, they are too cheap and prefer to rely on slave labor from the Philippines.
I just can’t believe how many years I have put up with the bullshit substandard product because I wanted to cheer on these entrepreneurs. I am all but convinced it was all a big marketing ploy and I fell for it hook like and stinker. [sic]. I will not buy another Wyze product of pay for another Wyze service again.
And I encourage you to avoid Wyze just the same.