Horrible – Amazon Cloud Cam Review

This is an assessment after using this for a few months. It’s horrible and the velocity of release/fix is unacceptable given the bugs present in the device and this app. Here’s a list of bugs that’s been around since release. Still present as of April 2018. 1. App fails miserably when switching orientation between portrait and landscape. 2. App often gets stuck in recording view and fails to exit to live view. To repro, tap on motion detection notification in landscape mode on iPad, which takes you to recording. Try exiting to live view. You can’t! 3. App doesn’t let you zoom in on recordings. 4. App randomly crops and gets stuck when trying to zoom in. 5. Recording is often heavily pixelated with 100mbps connection with no traffic. 6. Motion based recording often fails because of pixelation. 7. No Apple TV app. 8. No concept of household for home/away feature. Did they design this for single people living by themselves? 9. Home/away assumes the person/device is permanently home if your beacon device powers off while you’re home. Even worse if you uninstall the app while you’re home it will assume you’re always home with no way to fix. 10. Recording starts too late or ends too early. It misses the relevant action 90% of the time. This is a deal breaker for a security cam. 11. Start up / restart takes too long (>3minutes) if it power cycles or network temporarily drops. 12. The setting for audio (playback, and not recording) doesn’t stick. 13. No multi cam view if you have more than one camera. 14. Resolution isn’t good enough for capturing license plates. Another deal breaker for security camera. 15. Video tends to get very pixelated when motion is detected and it starts uploading. Given the fast connection, I have to assume it’s the device being overworked or Amazon servers being overloaded. I’m paying for cloud cam service. It’s 1080p when nothing is moving. It’s sub-240p when there is motion. Completely useless... 16. When the upload bandwidth is temporarily maxed the video pixelates. (Eg when running speed test) But the quality never recovers when the bandwidth returns to normal. Video remained pixelated for 30minutes after bandwidth capacity returned to normal. The test was terminated at this point. @Amazon, I suggest getting higher caliber engineers if you want to gamble with monitoring and controlling entry in to peoples home. This is penny wise pound foolish on a colossal scale given the negligence/liability.
Review by Eijh on Amazon Cloud Cam.