Reminds me of old Samsung phone I had. It had IR transmitter and some app to control it as TV remote.<p>But it wasn't <i>Samsung's</i> app, nor (I assume) one owned by them. Still installed as system app so unable to uninstall tho.<p>So one day the company decided to monetize on that and just started to display ads on lockscreen. No way to remove it either. So I rooted that POS and never bought any Samsung shit again...
Hi!<p>There is this remote camera app for baby cameras and home survelliance cameras, that all of a sudden started displaying ads in the application that lets you access the camera remotely.<p>Also these ads are full screen, unskippable 5-10 second ads that occasionally have sound as well.<p>Upon asking about this, the only reaction from them is a canned response telling about some discount, but there was no ad in the product before, they changed the deal afterwards.<p>Is this the new trend for companies to extract revenue from already sold products?<p>How is it legal to add ads into an already sold product afterwards?
There is a special circle of hell for business people who try to turn every single product into a continuous revenue stream. It’s just artificial rent seeking and people who involve themselves in it are morally deficient.
Avoid anything that requires its own app, Internet access, or mentions "cloud" in any way. AFAIK plain old "dumb" IP cameras with widely compatible HTTP/RTSP streams are still available.<p>Ironically, you used to be able to just Google for publicly accessible IP cameras, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5116676" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5116676</a> , and those don't need anything more than a browser to view, so that might guide your buying decision.
Yi cameras are the worst piece of crap you can get. The app is terrible, constantly pushes you toward the subscription and if you don’t subscribe they intentionally make it worse.<p>And now you get ads. Just trash these cameras if you have one
I didn't look into it but you might be able to flash a custom firmware on it. I do that with the yi home cameras + frigate and they have been super solid.<p>Edit: Seems like all the Kami ones have an equivalent yi home one. Should be doable from what I can tell. The process is pretty straight forward, flash the SD card with a folder, take it back out and add a file for wifi, then reinsert.
The home security or just monitoring camera market is so cheap and thus you get flaky software and bad actors.<p>There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground between the cheap stuff and the super duper professional expensive stuff where you need to buy a controller and etc.<p>Ive settled on wyze for now but I wouldn’t have a problem with a middle ground product.
YI Technology must be one of the stupidest companies we've seen in a while. Those guys need a "never go full retard" poster somewhere in the office.<p>ALERT! Heavy smoke detected in the house. Click to stream. But first, a word from our sponsor!
Unfortunately, the Yi Home cameras have eroded other functionality too to force their users into an upsell.<p>Many users are now reporting they are forced to use Kami cloud storage instead of local storage. Their ability to use the local SD card storage has been disabled in newer versions of the app.
I posted about the bait and switch 7 months ago. I see they have steered the wrong way and in a bad way.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33336722" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33336722</a>
Their app has been showing advertisements in notifications for the past few months, where previously a notification was only generated if movement was detected while the cam was in away mode (i.e. a serious matter).
> "Is there a way to get these away without purchase cloud subscription?"<p>Even with a subscription the ad-free honeymoon won't last.
Reminds me of a wifi connected sharp air conditioner I bought. Great device all in all but at some point sharp decided they want more revenue, so now the app to control the expensive hardware I bought is displaying completely random banner ads<p>I can already imagine the thinking process to hit some arbitrary OKR to somehow increase revenue per user or some crap like that<p>Very frustrating
This is the reason I changed to Amcrest and started entirely local recording. Ads have been introduced in all camera apps recently. Even the Ring app started to bother me because of their product discounts spammed all over the place.
This is terrible, but if we’re looking at things half glass full, a revenue stream gives manufacturers a reason to keep maintaining their products as opposed to abandoning them in 1-2 years