Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Let me begin by stating that I have FINALLY got this thing working correctly after months of frustration. And I was the person that ultimately figured out a fix. I will share this with you momentarily. (UPDATE 02/10/2017: It has come to my attention that this is a pretty wordy and long review. I'm sure not everyone is interested in, for instance, the things that I tried that didn’t work. Fair enough. For the convenience of those that would like to skip over those unnecessary details, after you read the sentence that begins with “The biggest issue I have had,” skip ahead to where you see ***SOLUTION***.) (UPDATE 07/10/2017: For several weeks now, I have been mulling around upping my original 3 stars to 4 because it has been quite some time since my original frustrations of setting up this device and the several app enhancements have made it ever more functional since my initial purchase. However, recent circumstances have moved my rating the other way. The past several weeks my Skybell has been losing power with greater and greater frequency. If I barely touched it, it would power back on, at which point I could lightly rock and twist without it powering off, and then I would check it after 5 minutes and it would be out again. This weekend I set aside time to troubleshoot it. Frustration one, the cheap plastic mounting screw immediately stripped, so I had to remove it with needle nose pliers. A very tedious task. My assumption was that pollen, dirt, or corrosion was interfering with the connection and a simple brushing off would fix things. When I got the back off, however, the true issue was quickly identified. The battery, less than 18 months old, yet out of warranty, has swollen up and pushed the back out making a round bulge right in the center. To get it working I wrapped the power wires down several of the threads of the screws so they would stand out further when screwed back into place. I haven't lost power since doing this. I still give it two stars because it still functions. If it completely dies before it reaches 4 years old I will drop it down to 1 star. Clearly, with the battery already failing at less than 2 years in, these are not built to last. Photos of the back added.) Pros: The daytime video on this thing is excellent and the color night vision is phenomenal. Physical set up was a breeze. Our existing doorbell was mounted to the brick and mortar wall, and Skybell's bracket matched up perfectly with the existing holes, so no drilling. Had I needed to though, it comes with the proper drill bit to do so. I do have to ding them for the mounting screw. It is plastic and stripped almost immediately so I had to finish tightening it with some needle nose pliers. That was pretty difficult. Here is a huge pro, and ultimately why I chose SkyBell over the competition. Once you buy your product they provide you with free video storage and unlimited free downloads. No subscription fees! Ring, among others, cost about the same and then you are stuck paying a subscription to be able to use your new expensive hardware. The last pro I can think of is the product looks really good. Cons: Easiest con to explain, is the speaker quality is mediocre. It gets the job done though. SkyBell's top priority is iOS. When they add a new feature or fix iOS gets it quite a bit in advance. For example, the iOS app has had the ability to adjust the motion sensor for weeks and it still hasn't made it to Android. I couldn't even activate it on my phone (Moto X Pure 2015), I had to use a Galaxy S7 to sync it. While we are on motion sensitivity, out of the box the motion sensor is way too sensitive. There website says if someone lingers by the door for 10 seconds before sending you a push notification. But as soon as we were stepping out of the door it would go off. Both our original and replacement unit had this issue. Also, the unit was picking up cars driving by on a road 50 feet away from our house or changes in lighting (shadows moving in the distance). After the first day of receiving 6 notifications in under an hour, we had to turn off one of the advertised features. Luckily, a few weeks later they added the ability to adjust the sensitivity and I just so happened to have an iPhone in a drawer, and I was able to use the iOS app to put it on low. Now we don't get any notifications from the motion sensor. Now that I think about it, I am actually concerned if it is working at all on low. We have packages delivered and such and I haven't had any notifications since making the adjustment. I see in other reviews apparently changing to low makes it as useless as high. Where with high you get constant notifications and low it is nearly impossible to trip the motion sensor. I haven't done further testing myself, but that seems to be holding true here given the activity I know has been in front of it recently. The biggest issue I have had with this unit, which literally took 2 months of exchanges with their support before I figured out a solution, was getting the video, yes the head line feature, to work. On demand and button pushes would sometimes take 30 seconds to 2 minutes for the video to start coming through and even then it would be just primary colors or video with static in large areas of the video or a black screen with little dots of light randomly spread out. Completely useless if trying to id a vandal or package thief or to have a conversation with whoever was there (because usually they weren't there but I couldn't tell since I couldn't see). I immediately went to their website, read through the FAQ, troubleshooting, and support info. I logged on my TP-Link Archer C5 changed the channel bandwidth to 20Mhz and checked everything else was as they suggested. No luck. I changed my Cat5 cables to Cat6. Nothing. I tried getting a extender and putting it in the outlet next to the window where SkyBell sat. Same issues. I had my cable company come out and hook up a cable port in the room closest to SkyBell. No improvement. I cleared all other devices off of the 2.4Ghz channel and only allowed SkyBell to use it. Nope. Firmware, all up-to-date. I did several speed test for Skybell's SSID and was consistently clocking over 3Mbps, well over double Skybell's requirement of 1.5Mbps. When I told support my results they actually said, well 5-6Mbps would be better. Really? Ok, called Internet provider and upped the speed. Now I'm getting just over 6Mbps. No improvement. Somewhere along the way they sent a replacement product and nothing got better. Skybell's support is an absolute joke. They are very nice, but they repeatedly failed to fully read my emails. I would give them very detailed information like, I did a speed test, under these conditions, and here were my results. And they would reply something like, here's an idea, do a speed test, here's how to do it, and let me know the results. This happened repeatedly with various bits of information. Finally, being at my wits end, I wrote them an email letting them know I couldn't wait for them to start selling their product through 3rd party vendors so I could start reviewing it (true to my word). I listed my previous experience, recapped the issues, and told them to quit trying to blame my settings, ISP, and acknowledge their product was not functioning properly. I received a phone call the next day apologizing for my experience. Again, I had to repeat myself constantly to the guy trying to make things better from having to repeat myself constantly. Even after correcting him several times that I have had only 2 units (the 1st and one replacement), at the end of the call he was still perplexed that I was having issues on my 3rd unit. He also kept saying things like I was the only person having issues with their product, still not owning the issue. Being at work, he said he was going to shoot an email to me with the details regarding his top tech guy who would be calling me either tonight or tomorrow. I sat at home all day Saturday waiting and never received the call. It turns out the guy was off those 2 days. Seems like an easy thing to check and an unacceptable error when you are trying to fix an upset customer's issue. I finally get a call from the top guy and we run through pretty much the same info and same troubleshooting again. Side note, anytime I reset the device it would kind of work for about 24 hours before issues returned, so it made it hard to immediately let him know if anything changed right then. ***SOLUTION*** He suggested that I get a Netgear router because he's noticed a lot of issues with TP-Links, mine was only 3 months old and had the latest (I know this is about to change) AC standard. But I did. I got the Netgear AC1750. No improvement. I would like to mention that I also have a Canary cam that happily worked in every configuration I had trying to get SkyBell to work. I emailed him back a week ago asking him to review the settings he wanted on this unit and he still hasn't contacted me. I deduced that the primary thing that SkyBell needs to operate correctly is upload speed. It has to get the video to their server in order to record and relay that data to the requesting device. So I enabled QoS upload, ran the speed test to determine the value to use for speed cap, added a rule using SkyBell's MAC ID Address and gave it the highest priority. Since doing this, videos start on the app in under 2 seconds. My TP-LINK doesn't have a QoS setting, so it looks like I will be keeping the Netgear. I'm only in my first 48 hours since adding the QoS setting and issues have had a tendency to pop back up in a day or two. I will be sure to update my review if they do return. (UPDATE #2 02/10/2017: Someone in the comments mentioned that my Netgear/QoS solution worked for them and shared that “All SkyBell MAC IDs start with "D0:C1:93".” I thought this may be helpful to anyone trying to do their own troubleshooting.) One other issue I have noticed is if I try to launch Skybell through the notification popup that I get from a button press or motion detection, all I get is a black screen. But if I ignore the convenient popup and instead go to the app and launch it and then click watch live everything is fine. I have read several reviews of the 2.0 that had this same issue so I hope it is something they are aware of and attempting to fix. Areas SkyBell needs to improve: Better trained customer support, better mounting screw, better speakers, hardware that plays nice with a broader range of routers and phones, and equal treatment of iOS and Android. Photos: Installed on wall (looking good), day time on demand video, night time video so you can see color night vision (no porch light is on), and one where you can see just how dark it is on my front porch before starting the night vision video (top part of the picture with the watch live button in it).