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Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 June 2023TLDR - this doorbell literally works only when it feels like it.
I should start my review by saying that I have a fairly smart home - Alexa everywhere, Lightwaverf switches, CCTV cameras, cloud enabled heating, in fact the only smart home gadget I didn’t have was a video doorbell. So, after seeing a flood of reviews recently for the Aqara G4 I gave it a try.
It’s sadly another classic Chinese tech product, i.e. decent hardware spoiled by unintuitive and flaky software. I really struggle with the Aqara Home app, with its “boards” and “cards” and basic functions buried under several menu layers. When you do drill down to the menu items that actually relate to the doorbell, several basic obvious options just don’t exist. There are options like detection frequency, duration of stay, but with no help file to tell you what these actually do.
Apparently Aqara gives you 7 days of cloud storage for free but nowhere is that shown in the Aqara app. I can replay 6 second clips but I have no idea if these are being held on my local SD card or in Aqaras cloud.
The alert settings page has a menu title row that I only realised after several days actually scrolls sideways with lots more options! And this row is sited not at the top of the page, but below a mysterious menu called “associated event label” (I still have no idea what that’s for). I used to work for a software company and something this confusing should never have seen the light of day.
Clips seem to get recorded at random, and often the Aqara app won’t show any clips less than a few days old.
Given the shortcomings of Aqaras software I tried using Apple’s Home app to control and monitor the G4, which is better designed but still far from perfect and often just fails to record anything (just like the Aqara app). Removing and re-adding the doorbell seems to help but isn’t a practical fix. Maybe the fact that this doorbell camera works in Apple Home is the reason why Aqara seems to have made such a half hearted attempt with its own app.
I tested the camera for three days indoors in which time the supplied batteries dropped from 100% to 40%. I couldn’t see any way they would last 4 weeks, let alone the claimed 4 months. With 6 AA batteries costing say £3-£5 that’s a fair cost over a year. So, I hardwired mine. Then I heard on various internet forums about the higher incidence of connection issues with hardwired Aqara G4 doorbell cameras, and sure enough the live view in غ Alexa no longer works. It worked fine during testing but mysteriously not now. I tried removing the batteries (I’d left them in as backup) but still no Alexa Live View anymore. Everything else does kind of work, so as of today it’s a keeper but I’ll update this review if that changes. (Edit - a few weeks on, and I wish I had returned this when I could). What does annoy me is that I have a bulky oversized doorbell because it’s designed to house 6xAA batteries, which I no longer use.
I have found that rebooting the doorbell sometimes makes it work again so I have plugged the Camera unit and chime units into remote controlled sockets that are set to power off and on each night to reset the system. I really shouldn’t have to do that…
In summary, my experience so far is that the Aqara G4 doorbell is flaky and untrustworthy. Luckily it still chimes when the button is pressed, so at least I haven’t taken a backward step from my old traditional doorbell…
