Me: Your cameras and hub stop working after a month or two
Vivint: That’s normal. We recommend restarting our equipment every month.
Me: So wait, if I don’t baby your product and restart it regularly, it just errors out and sits dead?
Vivint: Unfortunately that’s just the state of the technology.

After assessing the conversation I thought: No it’s not the technology! You can either make the software and hardware more resilient, or make it restart itself on a timer. The technology is fine, your product just sucks!

I switched to Vivint because I was told they’re better than ADT, but it’s been same-old-same-old and they even have fewer features (for example, only one alarm zone and limited user permission controls, so I can’t give my tenant control over the basement separately from the main floor).

Their doorbell camera has to be restarted with the breaker box (shut off power to that room) or with a special screwdriver, and it dies a few times a year (no alert, it just stops responding). When it or the HUD decide to start fritzing out, a hard reset is the only cure. When working, sometimes the doorbell decides to alert me 30 minutes after it’s pressed, instead of on time. They explored my house to try to find something in the way that would interrupt it, and made all sorts of excuses. None of my other devices have these issues (losing connection, dying after 60 days of not being reset, general fussiness), just the security equipment.

It’s a good thing this company doesn’t make medical devices or they’d be killing patients, like the Therac-25 did. Oh wait, they’re a security company whose product is supposed to keep people safe. I’ll bet their terms of service etc are very carefully written to shirk any responsibility if there’s a break-in and their dumpster product does nothing.

You’d think security equipment would be more reliable? But I had many similar problems with ADT, and I wonder if they both just have the same supplier and try to pretend to be different.

So here’s my big question: Is Vivint uniquely terrible in this area, or are all security companies going to be about the same? (I live in Utah, btw).

Devices that need to reset themselves every 30 days seems like a solvable problem (or just fix the bug that makes them die), but maybe none of the companies that make this equipment can be bothered with reliability — it’s only your security equipment, after all.