Great garage-door app. Terrible execution of the video product.
I’ve used myQ for years, and for its original purpose, monitoring and controlling my garage door, the app has been virtually flawless. That reliability is exactly why I trusted the brand enough to purchase the Video Keypad. Unfortunately, my experience with the video product has been the exact opposite.
The Video Keypad continually goes offline despite having a strong Wi-Fi signal at the garage. If the primary feature available without a subscription is live video, then the live video needs to work consistently. Mine does not.
That makes myQ’s subscription model even more frustrating. After the trial, there is no recorded video history without paying for a subscription. If something happens while the camera is offline, or you simply aren’t watching the live feed at that moment, there is no recording to go back and review unless you are paying myQ for video storage.
That raises an obvious question: If the free live feed cannot be depended upon, while the useful fallback, recorded video, is behind a subscription, how much practical security value does this product actually provide without paying an ongoing fee?
I cannot say whether that is intentional, but from a consumer’s perspective the result is the same. I bought the hardware, the included live video functionality has been unreliable, and the feature that would compensate for that limitation requires another recurring payment.
For a security related product, reliability should be the baseline, not something a customer has to work around by purchasing a subscription.
What makes this particularly disappointing is that Chamberlain/myQ clearly knows how to make a good connected product. The garage door control portion of myQ has worked extremely well for me for years. That was the product that established my confidence in the company in the first place. The Video Keypad simply has not lived up to that standard.
Companies ultimately respond to consumer purchasing decisions. There may be little accountability for releasing an unreliable product or putting increasingly basic functionality behind subscriptions, but consumers still have the power of the purse.
My recommendation: Use that power. Do not purchase a product whose basic functionality does not meet your expectations and then reward the manufacturer by paying an additional subscription to make the product more useful.
Fix the connectivity. Provide purchasers with a reasonable amount of basic recording history. Then the Video Keypad might deserve the reputation myQ earned with its garage door products.
The Video Keypad continually goes offline despite having a strong Wi-Fi signal at the garage. If the primary feature available without a subscription is live video, then the live video needs to work consistently. Mine does not.
That makes myQ’s subscription model even more frustrating. After the trial, there is no recorded video history without paying for a subscription. If something happens while the camera is offline, or you simply aren’t watching the live feed at that moment, there is no recording to go back and review unless you are paying myQ for video storage.
That raises an obvious question: If the free live feed cannot be depended upon, while the useful fallback, recorded video, is behind a subscription, how much practical security value does this product actually provide without paying an ongoing fee?
I cannot say whether that is intentional, but from a consumer’s perspective the result is the same. I bought the hardware, the included live video functionality has been unreliable, and the feature that would compensate for that limitation requires another recurring payment.
For a security related product, reliability should be the baseline, not something a customer has to work around by purchasing a subscription.
What makes this particularly disappointing is that Chamberlain/myQ clearly knows how to make a good connected product. The garage door control portion of myQ has worked extremely well for me for years. That was the product that established my confidence in the company in the first place. The Video Keypad simply has not lived up to that standard.
Companies ultimately respond to consumer purchasing decisions. There may be little accountability for releasing an unreliable product or putting increasingly basic functionality behind subscriptions, but consumers still have the power of the purse.
My recommendation: Use that power. Do not purchase a product whose basic functionality does not meet your expectations and then reward the manufacturer by paying an additional subscription to make the product more useful.
Fix the connectivity. Provide purchasers with a reasonable amount of basic recording history. Then the Video Keypad might deserve the reputation myQ earned with its garage door products.
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You people are crazy
I am 85 years old you are telling me to climb letters in my garage. Open the garage door opener, and touch wires, you are nuts. This is not worth it.
Easy Peasy
It is so convenient to close and open!
Great product
Great product
Needs a little work
The app has a few glitches that need work like accessing scheduling (for those with this issue they are helpful Reddit threads addressing the problem). What it really needs is a CarPlay app and/or widget for the many users that do not have a vehicle that supports the geolocation feature or that feature doesn’t fit how they want their opener to behave.
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