UX is buggy, feels beta. Paywalled video data is non CCPA compliant
5 days into life with the Litter-Robot 5 Pro. The hardware is sleek, but the user experience is currently in "unpaid beta tester" territory. At nearly $1,000, this should just work. My owner is not happy. Litter Robot 5 Pro has fallen offline twice already without self-recovering. It supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz. We've tried both, yet it struggles on a network where every other IoT device is rock solid. Only a hard power cycle fixes it. During onboarding, we followed Whisker’s advice and put litter in the globe of the powered-off robot to acclimate the kittens before turning it on for a couple days. Then when we turned it on, the setup process didn't account for pre-loaded weight of our litter, so the scale tared incorrectly said a kitten weighed 13lbs even before one stepped on the scale. The "AI" only identifies one kitten correctly. The pet-profile setup is vague about photo requirements, leading to 50% accuracy at best. Locking the dual-camera features behind a paywall for a device inside my own home is a bridge too far. There's a solution though: open a Local API! Whisker, you are missing a massive opportunity to partner with the DIY/Hacker community. Consider that CA residents, have legal rights to all of the data WITHOUT a subscription. Providing a local API allows you to fulfill these requirements because users can access all the data directly through the API. This would save your team time and money on manual compliance. Local access give us nerdy cats an opportunity to lighten your cloud processing overhead and eliminates your PR nightmare of a potential data breach involving in-home cameras that send everything to your servers. Showing that you want to be a partner with tech-savvy owners—rather than just another "subscription-hungry" company—will gain you massive goodwill. Don't pit the developer community against you; be our partner! Open the local API and let us help you make this hardware reach its full potential.