Kami Home

Yi and Kami (same parent company) used to be good until they’ve slowly stripped away features and now displays ads before you can access your cameras. It is frustrating to have to deal with ads when you get an alert from your camera and cannot view the video right away. The biggest pros to these cameras was the built in SD card slots so you can have a SD card in them to record the video and not have to pay for cloud based storage or subscription. Now this company is requiring the purchase of their cloud “premium” subscription in order to remove the ads. I will be replacing their cameras with Kasa and Tapo cams, same SD card slots and functionality but without the ads. If you’re going to delay the viewing of my cameras with ads, then the cameras should be free. I do not appreciate displaying ads for cameras I’ve paid for. By the time I get through the ads, the event for the alert I’ve received has already passed. I am scared for not being able to view critical events right away, where each second counts. Update: And their response is to offer a discount on their premium subscription to remove the ads. What a shake-down! My Kasa and Tapo cams are ad free and works the same way. Buy those instead. (Sort the reviews by most recent and you’ll see how these cams used to be good. Now they are just money hungry. Yi and Kami are the same company so don’t buy Yi cameras either unless you want the same headache dealing with ads.)

Now that is a real update worthy of 5 stars. Changed rating from Zero to 4. Only because when I purchased the product a year ago I was promised 7 days cloud service then you cut it to 3 then 1 day. SD functionality completely taken away Dear Kami, Zero rating. This is not the first time you have taken away features. When I first purchased the product I was promised 7 day cloud service. Then you reduced to 3 days and now one year later it is only one day. The latest update in September 2021 took away many and more features to make it impossible for SD card users to review history. I got an email saying that you released an update. That is not true! I updated the the app an still does not work. I can no longer see video stored on the SD card beyond one day. You also took away the time stamp feature. I removed and reinstalled the app; same issue. Your tech support is unresponsive. You cannot ever get anyone on the line. I hope to get your attention here. If you want me to redo this review please revert back to the previous version or fix this one right away. Your email about the fix is not true. The issues are not fixed. Your phone message says my call is very important. Then why you never have anyone to answer. That is dishonest. Please update your message to say there is no phone support. Just tell the truth instead of sending emails saying you fixed the bug and asking your customers to update their reviews.

Update: As of the latest version of the app on Mar. 3, 2020 (with the redesigned UI), the “new alert” dot no longer persists after viewing the alert, so that’s good. Notifications for the alerts now seem to appear promptly, so that’s even better. However, now the Home/Away setting doesn’t work. Upon returning home and switching the app to Home, the camera remains on and sends alerts when I enter the room. I have to go into the settings for the camera and manually switch it off. This is not a big inconvenience compared to tapping the Home button, but users should be aware that your camera may not be monitoring the house unless you manually turn it on, since tapping Away does not activate it (at least for me). Old review: I don’t have the issues that other reviewers have mentioned, however the app constantly tells me that there are alerts to view (by placing a dot over the Alerts button) when there are no new alerts. Sometimes tapping Alerts clears the dot and sometimes it takes more tries before it finally goes away. The bigger issue is that push notifications simply don’t work. I’ve only received one notification from the app, and it was days after the actual event where the camera noticed movement. With a delay like that, the camera cannot be used as an alarm for the home owner, only as an after-the-fact record of what happened (assuming that someone doesn’t unplug the camera and take it before it uploads its footage!).