Wyze Sharing Much Better Than Amazon's

I’ve never used this Wyze feature before. I generally use Alexa for device control so I can mix brands in a single app.

Objective: Share some lights with a family member who has their own Amazon account.

Predicted difficulty: Trivial

Amazon difficulty: Basically impossible

Wyze difficulty: Easy as pie

The person got a new Fire tablet. They have a lot of Kindle books. Because the stock apps on Fires are linked ONLY to the device’s registered account and you can’t even log off the app, it is not possible for the Device Control or Alexa apps to stay on our home control Alexa app while the Kindle app lets the user get to their library.

I tried everything I could think of including a few sideloads and both Teen and Child Amazon "household* sharing and profiles before I realized my simple objective could not be done with Amazon. (You can share a single “adult” with a real Amazon account and we had already used that slot for preserving another Kindle’s purchases. Even then that would introduce issues with unneeded profile switching.)

All we wanted was to grant access for a few lights!

Two of them were already Wyze bulbs. The ultimate solution was swapping out the Wemo Plug for a spare Wyze plug, getting the user their own Wyze account, and sharing the 3 devices.

What a damned relief. It worked simply and well. The user can create their own groups and shortcut widgets. It just works. (I wish I could group all 3 together but Wyze doesn’t allow that since one is a plug. Also wish home screen widgets worked on a Fire.)

Amazon Alexa’s sharing is a limited mess of painful subpar hoops. Check out “Household” some time. Teen and Child accounts have to be new and don’t really work for this purpose. Even “guest” mode is limited to 24 hours. It sucks.

The Wyze sharing method is simpler and superior in every way. I don’t often find myself saying that. :slight_smile:

Thanks for reading.

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