UniFi Protect

—Updated as of version 1.20.0– The developers have finally added the ability to have custom sound notifications for camera detections! Thank you! I have updated this to a 5 star rating! —Original Review— I have been using Unifi products for awhile now. Protect is a great app that works mostly flawless, however there is one feature it NEEDS to have that would make a HUGE difference. This app NEEDS to include custom sounds for its push notifications. On Apple products there is no way to create custom sound notifications for push notifications in settings. 3rd party apps have to have custom sounds “baked in” to their software. Protect does not have this feature so as of iOS 17 we are stuck with Apple’s very soft global notification sound for all notifications within the Protect application. I don’t hear my motion notifications!!! Protect developers could you please do us all a favor and put this feature at the top of the list to add in a future update?!? It’s all over the internet that people want it, and now NEED it! You have a stellar app, now I just need to hear my push notifications!

My system used to work really good before the last update and I used to be able to see events in real time and was able to catch people at my door etc while the motion was detected and recording the event with only a 2-3 second delay. With this new update there is a like a 10 second delay with viewing the clips because it has to load and most times the event doesn’t show up the first time you click on it so you have to close the clip and click it again. By the time that you get to view the event it’s too late to take live action because 40-50 seconds have passed and you are pushing a minute and people are already leaving or gone by then. I live in an area that is not the best so the real time notifications helped me navigate and turn on lights quickly or whatever I needed to deter people from my home. The live feed is also very slow and delayed, it lags really bad and even though I am watching it it doesn’t show everything live. Cars and people are frozen most time when you watch the feed, it’s like you see them, freezes and then they are gone when it updates the feed. Also, one of my cameras has a hard time catching events at night that it used to, even after trying to ‘fix’ the settings. I really liked my cameras until this update, please fix these lag issues, I prefer the previous versions better.

While I’m a huge fan of Ubiquiti products I find the app features for the doorbell severely lacking. First off, there should be a persistent ringing on my phone when it’s pushed and a button right on the notification on my phone that allows me to answer and talk to whoever is at the door. They built the hardware (and it’s excellent) but they released it without the necessary upgrades to the software to make it truly usable as a video doorbell. They have a text screen with a preset for DND but it doesn’t silence the doorbell. They need scripted actions available that do things like mute the chimes & alerts when in DND and they need to make these more accessible right from the main screen instead of buried in camera settings. It’s a great start but needs many improvements on the software side. The rest of the camera features are excellent and if I was just looking for security cameras alone this is a great platform. I will say this, some of the other players in the video doorbell market have been doing this a lot longer and still don’t have many things right. Ubiquiti has an opportunity here to bring their name into business the way Apple has done, through the personal use of influencers. I think there’s a lot to do here and they’d be wise to do it sooner rather than later.