Don’t get me wrong, I like the cameras for what they can do in the price range they’re at.
My frustration is at the brain trust at Eufy that manages their software products like Eufy Security app (iOS/Android/MacOS). It’s apparent that there is no product management that oversees how this app is designed and maintained.
Let start with accounts. The main admin account is used on my wife’s phone which isn’t the problem. It comes when you add another “admin” account. This addition “admin” account can do everything the primary admin account can do, but from the UI I cannot see the events per camera like my wife can see,
Support tells me it’s a “privacy” concern. Please if that other “admin” account can add/remove camera’s, change their settings and see ALL events. How is displaying the number of events per camera a “privacy” concern.
I recently got the SoloCam S40 and I added it via my admin account and I had to “share” the device with my wife’s account. So now she has the same problem that I have, cannot see the events for that camera. If she clicks on Events it clears the counters for the other cameras, not what she wants.
The above goes to the next subject, device management. I shouldn’t have to “share” a camera to the “primary” admin account it should have been automatically added to the account when the “other” admin added it.
The Eufy Security app on the Mac is great to an extent. As I mentioned about getting the SoloCam S40, it’s nice that it has 2K recording but the downside is 8GB storage doesn’t last long when you have a lot of events and they were so kind enough not to consider allowing the owner to add extended storage. So, I decided to go into the app to bulk download videos and low-and-behold the camera isn’t listed. As per support, “due to the compatibility issue, the S40 has not been configured in MacOS”. What? Really? Did product management ever think that hey people are going to need to download videos in bulk being there’s only 8gb of storage so let make sure the MacOS app can see the device. Nope. Oh, and WHERE IS THE WINDOWS VERSION? Come on, how hard is it to port the MacOS version to Windows? Now I’m stuck downloading video by video and trying to remember which video I left off at and to boot the files aren’t named the same way they are when using the MacOS app so more work for me to catalog those videos properly.
There’re also inconsistencies with the notifications from the cameras. The SoloCam S40 notification displays as,
“eufy Security
[camera name]: Motion detected”,
the older cameras,
“[camera name]: (line break) Motion detected”.
Thanks for reading my venting and hopefully Eufy gets their act together and hires a better product manager for their apps.