August Home AUG-AB02-M02-S02 Silver August Doorbell Cam Pro

I bought 2 of these to pair up with my carport and front door in May and have not had any problems with them. I will admit that the radios, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, are pretty weak. Both doorbells are less than a foot away from the locks they are paired with having only a door separating them and the signal strength always reports as poor. This hasn't been an issue for me, they operate the locks flawlessly every time. I have a mesh Wi-Fi network with satellite routers within 20 feet of both doors which provides a solid 5ghz connection and reliable 500 Mbps internet service. The speed tests from the doorbells report 30+Mbps download and 5+ up. The video doesn't lag, doorbell calls are responsive and notifications are quick even away from home on TMobiles cell network. I would not recommend getting this if you would be unable to provide similar connectivity. The range on the Wi-Fi radios is pretty low. They'll drop down to 2.4ghz if a strong enough 5ghz signal isn't available. The speed tests suffer tremendously at 2.4ghz and it's during that time that performance isn't up to par. Most complaints I've read seem to be due to not having the proper infrastructure in place to support the low range radios in this product. Given that, I would only recommend this product to semi tech savvy people that can provide close and fast 5ghz Wi-Fi signal to the doorbell (I have a 3 router Orbi AC3000 mesh setup) and are able to supply at least 13volts through the doorbell wiring. So for my particular setup, this is a great product. If you have slow or spotty internet service or are not technically savvy enough to understand these requirements, I'd move on to something else as this will probably disappoint you.

I really wish I could recommend this doorbell, but I gotta say its a definite DON’T BUY. Lets face it, the main reason to buy a doorbell camera is security. Security devices, by their very nature, should be reliable.That is the first strike against the August Doorbell Cam. It seems that 50% of the time that I want to use it, the camera goes offline. If you want try to force it back online, you’ll need a screwdriver to take it off, and press a reset button, or you can just wait until it decides to come back online. To put this into perspective, I have a Linksys Velop Mesh network, with an access point on my foyer table about 10’ from the doorbell.The second strike is that the integration with the August lock seems to break they ability to remotely lock/unlock the door. I have the Homekit version of the door lock, and it works just fine by itself. Both the native and Homekit functions work flawlessly. When you connect the doorbell to the lock, they appear to use bluetooth to communicate. Well, the doorbell will, VERY OFTEN, lose connection to the door lock. That essentially takes the lock offline (although sometimes Homekit will still work). I’ve contacted August about this, and they were nice enough to send me a new doorbell. That didn’t fix anything, and I’ve found the best thing to do is to NOT connect the doorbell to the lock. And, before you say that it’s a lock problem, the lock ALWAYS appears on bluetooth. I’ve got my lock set to unlock when I get home, and that works flawlessly.The third strike is overall build quality. I’m on my third lock. This first one was DOA as the battery wouldn’t charge. The second exhibited the problem with the lock connection. The third has the same problem, so I’m just guessing that it’s design flaw.The fourth strike is their video processing. It seems that videos are processed in their cloud, and there is a bit of lag. So, if someone knocks on your door and leaves, you need to wait around 5 minutes before you can access the video. Sometimes, videos will just be stuck processing. Last night I ordered some pizza, 10 hours later, the video of the delivery is still processing. Again, a security device needs to be reliable.One last thing. That big button doesn’t actually look like a doorbell. Most people just knock on the door now and then ask me what the grey box is… Yeah, it’s modern looking, but it doesn’t exactly throw out good UI hints for users. If I were going to keep this thing, I’d have to add a sign above it saying “Push the big round button that doesn’t look like a button”.So, It’s probably time to look for something better. Too bad I’m out of $200 as I bought this in November, but at least I can stop some of you from having the same problems. Look at other devices, and make an informed decision.***Update 2019***I still have this POS, just waiting for a good HomeKit replacement to come out. I have noticed that this thing is temperature sensitive. Works ok in the winter, but spring hits and I get constant disconnect notifications to my iPhone. At about 75f, I start seeing disconnects. Oftentimes, I have to go and ring the doorbell and watch it go through it’s boot sequence to get it to reconnect. The best part is the customer support telling me that it’s not a temperature problem. Of course it’s because I’m using 5Ghz WiFi.

This is a great product. I was on the fence between the August Doorbell Cam and Ring. I decided to go for the August because of the integration with their line of smart locks.The installation was incredibly easy. I installed it in less time than it took to cook pasta (9 mins on the nose!)Video quality is good, even without night vision. I have a porch light and the low light capabilities are great.I love that it uses IR for motion instead of the video feed as this cuts out all false positives.I have no problem paying for a subscription. These guys are having to store so much data from these videos that $5 a month is a bargain.Thumbs up from me. August are making some great products.My one gripe is the lack of HomeKit integration. The August smart locks have it so why not the doorbell? My guess is they are waiting for iOS 11.3 and the change to software based authentication rather than a hardware requirement from Apple.