To carverofchoice,
Could you please direct me to “there are always specials and options to get brand new phone at $0 down and $0 monthly cost with a 2 year contract for phones that support the latest OS,”
Why would you need a 2yr contract to pay$0.
Would love to see that.
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Ya thanks. I do have tiny cam ( paid )on my fire TV/tablets and even phone as not 100% of my cams are just Wyze, although they have issues of their own where I could never get them to record to SD card for playback and wasn’t going to pay for cloud. I run 3 cam plus memberships currently.
Sadly Tiny cam for me lately has been horrible. Often the cams go offline or the app closes a dozen times before it is stable. This has also been happening in the wyze app.
I just wish I knew about this OS change a few months ago when I went from 3 wyze devices to 13, as I control outside plugs and bulbs through it as well on the tablets. The wyze outdoor plug hooked to a fan on low in the “cat” house on hot days/nights cools off my scared furry friends on one outlet and when I see the raccoon trying to sneak a meal, the other plug is attached to a handheld vac that scares the living hell out of it. My nightly entertainment. I have my cams set to turn on the bedroom lights on person detection so if I am in bed at midnight and someone is walking around my doors it turns on the lights. While I can set many of these up on the phone which is I think android 11, just worried about tablet functions. I guess we shall see!
PS let us set colors under rules for the color bulbs and not just shades of white please Wyze
currently in beta with the new rules engine.
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We are just fellow users. Only Wyze could say with any certainty what if any features will break on older app versions. Eventually I would expect all of them will.
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Or, at least, the ability to keep the older version of the app and not be required to update. And yes, an archive of all older, down rev apps for various reasons.
My iPad is forever locked at OS 1.3.4 and that’s not good enough to run Sonos on
What’s going to happen to all the people with a version of Android that’s too old. Are you planning to offer refunds for the equipment they have purchased that will no longer be useful without an app?
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Welcome @gary.heard!
This does not mean the app will stop working, some features might not be available though.
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Well, one of the main changes is that the Wyze Video Doorbell is moving to a more stable call/streaming method. The older OS versions cannot support it so that entire highly requested product wouldn’t work anymore. We don’t make this decision lightly and understand that it impacts folks and we apologize for that.
I’ll bring up the APK idea but I can’t promise we’ll do that. I forget all of the discussion, but we’ve had it before and there were strong reasons to not make those publicly available. I’ll see if I can at least get one of the most recent version before the OS compatibility is changed.
We aren’t trying to trap people into purchasing new phones, we promise. There’s a reason that we held onto this compatibility though it did cause some complications on our end to do it for a long time. But when we finally had to admit that we couldn’t get the doorbell change to work on those older OS, we had to move forward with this.
The current app will continue to work but you won’t be able to update it to the newer versions if you have an OS below the cutoff. So the basic camera streaming is good to go. 
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Thanks for the clarifications Gwendolyn.
If people with older phones want to keep using their Doorbell, does that mean they also need to refuse to update the firmware for that device too? Or will the new firmware allow the doorbell to continue to work with both the old app and old streaming protocol as well as the new app and new streaming protocol? Or will these people have to make sure to keep older doorbell firmware on there to ensure it will continue to stream to the old app?
That won’t affect me (I always update to the newest betas of everything), but I thought it would be good clarification to make for those people who are concerned about the issue, and who may need to know if they should keep the older firmware for their doorbell too.
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I know we’re still aiming for the best experience we can make but it’s looking like we cannot fit both methods on the doorbell. So hopefully that would be something we could do but I would currently expect the newer doorbell firmware to make things weird on older apps.
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As an early adopter to Wyze, I started buying Wyze products in November 2017, roughly about a month or so after the company started shipping products. And some of those legacy products are still in active use with me. From that early time to the present I have used a de-commissioned Android phone to access the Wyze App rather than my primary phone. It is somewhat frustrating to hear that the newer versions of the App will no longer support Android OS older than 7.0, but – since November 2017, Wyze released numerous products, all requiring specialization in feature and function. It was, and is, inevitable that all those features for all those different products would someday reach the point where only more updated Android OS versions could handle the demands. I am not happy with this, but I understand why it must happen. I would like to have had more advance notice to prepare, but will find a way to to adapt.
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Easy for Android users. Apple devices probably require some hacks/jailbreak.
Many sites, like this one, keep older APKs archived. You can also back up the APK yourself from your phone:
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FYI.
I’m down to one trusted repository (APKMirror) and they don’t carry everything. 
And Google is switching off of APKs this summer. They’re going to switch to their new bundling format and stop allowing APKs except for those grandfathered to it. I’m not sure how that will affect everything in the industry, but there will be some upcoming disruption for a bit at least.
seen that, but should still be able to sideload. I think this only affects the Play Store apps
My thoughts are:
- Google controls the majority of the mobile app market (particularly for Android)
- Google play has 3,800,000 apps available
- Amazon app store has 430,000 apps available (just 11% of what Google offers)
- Nearly everything on Android is made for Google Play, then added elsewhere basically only as an afterthought
So if Google switches off APK, so will everyone else, including Wyze with their future updates.
Here is my concern. theverge reports:
Which may mean that it won’t work to store AAB’s on mirror sites and that sideloading will not be an option for the majority of apps anymore because most of them will not have an APK, and AAB’s are only allowed through Google Play. Therefore, if Wyze is now an AAB, you can’t take that and sideload Wyze’s newest app into the Windows Android emulator because AAB’s are google play only. We’re thus back to not being able to load Wyze on Windows anymore, unless you load one of the old APK’s which don’t support a lot of the new protocol changes and feature updates, and quite possibly may even no longer work at all (we’ll have to see).
I have a feeling that if AAB’s are only allowed to work with Google, that everyone will start only developing for Google and mirror sites will start to die off and sideloading options will be slim, etc. I fear Google is trying to choke out competition by restricting the new format to only them, and most developers won’t bother to cater to the smaller options on Android when Google controls nearly 90% of the Android App Market.
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cough Windows 11 cough
we’ll see how it plays out, I see your point to sideload for a emulator but mirroring sites like apkpure are an easy target for malware.
I was a custom rom dev for many yrs, every app on android is a apk. Google would have to change the android structure, if they don’t sideloading should be still available, at least on android.
The Wyze app would be grandfathered so they may not have to change until Google forces another update. Now the Alpha app that Wyze uses in their hardware betas, that’s another story.
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Wow I wasn’t aware of this plan at all. Thanks, carver. Yet amother tech thing to be disappointed about. Google really continues down a bad path. Terminal iOS envy.
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Yeah, they’ve been casually discussing this for a while, but days after the Windows announcement, Google dropped some big info on their new upcoming limitations with these AAB’s going into effect really soon. Maybe intentionally to put pressure on Microsoft to support Google Play too…Now if Google makes sideloading most apps nearly impossible, Microsoft may be forced to negotiate with Google for sharing profits.
I have been quite disappointed in Google lately changing things to be more limited, proprietary and trying to make people pay more. They’ve done a lot of awesome things with disrupting industries (maps, photos/videos storage, AI, and tons of things), but then start pulling some janky moves after they’ve suffocated the competition. Of course lots of businesses do this. It’s not abnormal. It’s a big reason I avoid some of them.
We’ll see what happens. Windows might get some leverage once people start enjoying some Android apps on their PC. Someone might find a good hack to sideload Google’s new AAB’s too, since they are still Android compatible.
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