DEAR OMAR
Ring’s Neighborhood App Is Worse Than Useless
Ring doorbells see all, but know nothing
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Do you remember, way back about six or seven years ago, when Ring just made video doorbells?
This was after the small startup company competed on Shark Tank but before it was swallowed up Amazon, which made the now-ubiquitous doorbells the center of a universe; last time I checked, that universe now includes stand-alone security cameras, driveway lighting, car alarms, home and business security systems, smoke alarms, and mailbox sensors.
I was an early fan of Ring: It felt like a piece of hardware whose time had come. Riding on a wave of increasingly useful smart-home gadgets, the Ring doorbell was a way to take an important, but outmoded technology (the humble doorbell) and add a lot of useful features, like the ability to monitor package deliveries to your door, view motion-detector alerts, and link to other devices like your smartphone to give you a live video feed of your front door.
As clever and easy to install as Ring’s line of hardware products are (I also own the Pathlights, which work great), I’ve found their software to be much more problematic. Ring’s app software, for instance, has suffered from severe bloat as increasingly disparate product lines have been brought to the ecosystem. There are so many menus and options in the main Ring app now that navigating to find the option you need has become a chore, which is especially frustrating since these tech products were supposed to have been designed for the masses. Reporter Adrienne Samuels Gibbs recently wrote a piece for Debugger about how she’d hired a professional electrician to hardwire and install her Ring only to find out that the software had only partially been installed and required another professional to come out and finish the installation.
If you’re a believer that tech companies should stay out of the business of helping government agencies enforce laws or pursue suspects, you might have been shocked…
