YI Home Reviews

by LitlBit71

I have had a Yi camera for several years now and the camera is great, it’s the software and all the changes over this last few months that has made me change a 5 star rating down to a 1 star rating. The software has changed from allowing users to view a live feed plus 6 second snippets of recorded past feeds for 7 days to just viewing the live feed. Which of course renders the point of having the camera useless since most people don’t just sit and watch the live feed.
They have also disabled the use of using the sd card to play back the 6 second snippet videos when motion is detected. They say they are in the process of pushing an update to allow users this feature again but I still cannot view any prior videos. I get they want you to purchase a cloud subscription but to not tell their customers they are disabling the sd card and make you think there is something wrong with the camera or the sd card is pretty poor customer service. I can view the videos from the sd card on my computer so I know there is nothing wrong with the card but it’s quite inconvenient. Not to mention the point is to be able to view both the live feed and the recorded snippets through YIHome on whatever device you use.

by StaceUhMuhFace

The new update to YIHome is super frustrating. I’ve never had a problem saving recordings to the SD card, and now when I try to play back it says “no videos for this day” and then 30 min later there is video for the entire day available. Or if I watch playback and try to rewind the video or fast forward it doesn’t respond and is stuck on the original “motion tracking” activity in the alerts and I can’t control rewind or fast forward.

I just bought my second camera a few weeks ago and this new app upgrade makes me want to return it because it’s useless if I can’t even watch what is happening besides a 10 second clip. Before the upgrade, things were great, slightly glitchy app and my camera would freeze periodically and need to be unplugged. But now, not being able to watch back on the recordings is kind of a deal breaker and I refuse to be forced into paying for “cloud storage” when I have a SD card with plenty of storage. Ive had my 1st camera for over a year and never had to pay for cloud storage and relied solely on the SD card.

This seems pretty sneaky to remove the SD storage option to try and force people into paying for cloud storage. Not cool. And after reading other reviews, seems I’m not the only one considering purchasing a different brand and returning my camera. Wrong move on Yi’s part. You just lost a ton of customers.

by Shg71

Each update brings the promise of better performance, yet nothing really ever changes. The latest has actually made it easier for me to access my sd card saves, but it still seems unreasonably slow and clunky to do so. (Even over my internal network, which is fast for scrubbing video on other devices, including a doorbell cam I have and live, remote play from an Xbox over wifi to my phone). I’ve also run speed tests both at the modem and on devices connected to the internal wifi and I’m getting more than sufficient bandwidth. So I’m guessing it’s either round trip to servers (which I’m guessing are all in China) or the hardware itself isn’t capable enough to keep up.

In addition, performance of the live camera is flakey at best. Takes way too long to load the cameras, then it will be stuttering or will lag (or worse crash) while viewing. Image quality, even at highest HD setting, won’t identify a face or license plate at greater than about 10ft, either.

Either way, if you’re planning on this being used as a security system, don’t. It’s at best something to use to just check if a package was delivered or if you closed your garage, but not reliable or fast enough to warn you in time if someone is actually breaking into your home.

by Cabbit007

This is a review about YIHome and not the camera. I like the camera but YIHome needs some work. First I will state the good parts. YIHome allows you to turn off the IR lights without turning off the IR cutoff filter. It has a 6 second cloud storage on activity detection. The camera loads pretty fast. You can add additional security via PIN number and it supports Touch ID. You can select activity area for motion detection.

Now, the bad parts. The motion sensor on lowest setting is still pretty sensitive. YIHome only supports custom activity area for up to 2 cameras. My third camera doesn’t even have an option for activity area despite it being the same model as my other cameras. The notification icon will show old videos that are not deleted every now and then. It doesn’t support auto orientation.

I can live with most of my negatives. However that first one of being restricted to just 2 cameras for activity area really renders my third camera obsolete as I get too many false positives to be useful.

by Toobusy9561

Been using Yi cameras for a few years. Got a Kami to replace the old outdoor Yi that was noisy. So noisy that you could not hear people talking on the recordings. The microphone was too loud. Anyway , the cameras work ok but YIHome , that's a whole other issue. They have a good app but always seem to break it with the big user interface upgrades. By the time they finally get things working again- they push out another broken UI update and we do this all over again. Still not working right from the last UI update despite several app tweak updates. The goal seems to be to phase out the SD Card user and force the cloud subscription service. That's fine but I'll never put my home security into the "cloud" of an unknown brand (and one that has multiple brands). So if/when that happens, I'm out. Until then - they are very lacking in customer service. Have an issue now that I contacted CS for, got a flip card response and then nothing. I have contacted them several more times and nothing. I can't suggest Yi/Kami anymore. They used to be a much better company before when they were just Yi but now, it's sliding downhill.

by Swenpaylay

I have five of these little Yi cameras now and indeed they are good cameras. Impressive clarity and durability for the price. The original one I bought has survived repeated drops attempts at its destruction and a few cold winters and dusty summers outside. Good nightvision and motion tracking regardless of generation/model too. So the hardware is 10/10

The problem is YIHome . It gets worse by the year and is practically unusable as of late 2021. Time scrolling is clunky. Pinch zooming doesnt really work anymore. And frankly, the cameras often miss events I want to see and it has become near impossible to search and find those moments. Just terrible. Each update brings more bugs and less features. I have the $80 cloud plan too. Even if I went back to SD card only i have found the cameras reformat the cards in a way that my mac can no longer read them at all. I used to be able to format the cards in fat32 to make it easy but now the cameras reject that. A workaround is importing via ipad for whatever reason.

One or two of these is great for piece of mind or checking on your pet. But having five and the cloud plan is a waste.

by 4 Eyes4565

Previous versions operated properly, but about 3 or 4 updates ago, a bug was introduced that prevents this. I like to watch TV while watching this, and the video will not go into landscape mode. I emailed support, and they suggested reinstalling YIHome . I did that, but the problem persists. I checked other iPads in the house, same issue. The funny part is that Yi support sent me an email asking me to rate their support. What support? You did nothing to solve my problem. If this problem is not resolved, I will throw out my yi camera’s, and buy something with support that is actually useful. On a positive note, the cameras are clear, the interface is OK, but not great, and having an mini SD card slot to hold video is a great feature. With a better support team, this camera system could be a winner. I am slightly concerned about Chinese ownership, considering China’s behavior recently, so if things get worse between our 2 countries, I may dump them anyway, due to security concerns.

by Ridogi

I got these cameras because they could record locally to a micro SD card, supported WiFi, and are inexpensive. YIHome interface is pretty decent. The cloud storage is expensive, but not a concern as I will use the local storage. There is a free trial that expires but other services offer free cloud storage. The ability to rotate a camera 90 degrees in software to match physically rotating it would be ideal as I need a vertical view of one location so it shows up sideways until I view it full screen. The major red flag with this service is the 16 character maximum password length which means they are likely not hashing your password and are storing it in plain text. There is no 2 factor support. In addition they don’t connect to WiFi networks with special characters, and silently fail the setup leading you to believe they require firmware update. Changing the WiFi password lets setup continue normally once you realize what is happening. Lastly the wirecutter review says the local storage only stores six second clips with 3 minute gaps between them, but they record continuously from what I have seen.

by Keekeh

I bought these cameras back in the end of 2017 to watch over my daughter overnight when I moved her to her own room, since her room is pretty far from mine in the house. I never had a problem with keeping YIHome open all night on a spare phone and being able to see and hear her anytime either I woke up throughout the night or she cried. I continued to use the cameras for this same purpose now with my son, and didn’t have any issues initially, However, the most recent updates to YIHome now make YIHome shut down after a while and when I wake up my phone screen is off and YIHome is closed, or I wake up to hearing my baby screaming wildly, for God only knows how long before I notice, because YIHome is closed for some unknown reason. I would have given a 5 star review previously, but this glitch is making me consider buying a different brand camera cause I need something that will stay on all night without issues.

by Woody306

Update:
Company’s new release fixed all the issues that both myself and many other customers had with the previous release. I am very pleased with the new app and its functionality. It is also a breath of fresh air to see a company listen to its customers, thank you YI Home. Below is my previous update that has been completely resolved.

You are going to lose a long standing regular customer. This update is horrible. Lost so much functionality. No time and date stamp in the video. No video record feature, loads with the cloud as standard storage and you have to toggle over to SD on every camera every time. I have 9 cameras currently and 4 new outdoor cameras I was going to put up, but now I am looking at sending them back and going with another company. I don’t know how anyone thought this update was a good idea literally just go back to the previous version.

by Drayface15

I’m glad I have these. They have really Lear picture quality and are so easy to set up. The night vision is even really good. I like that I don’t have batteries to replace or recharge. YIHome has a good amount of setting features so you can customize the sensitivity, the microphone and speaker functions, set up times for the motion alerts to be on/off, etc. It also allows me to share my cameras so that other family members can view live footage and get alerts if you give permission.

I wish the motion alerts were longer than 6 seconds. The motion alerts definitely work great (and sometimes are too sensitive, but that’s adjustable) as they pick up headlights in the street that shine in my front window, my pets entering a room, a squirrel on my deck, etc. We recently added micro SD cards to our cameras and that allows us to go back and review a timeframe where I want to see more than a 6 second clip.

I have one camera facing out a window and it works great during the day. However, at night, the glare from inside decreases picture clarity significantly and makes the motion alerts sorta pointless since it detects all the movement inside the room instead of outside in the yard. It might be better to buy an outdoor camera if that’s what you plan to use it for.

by THe SR5

So I don't do reviews... But over all I'm please with the quality of the camera and the night feature is great! And as far as YIHome for what I think it's main intention was for its great, I like how you can tap to make the camera center somewhere, the overall video quality us good most of the time. The sound is a bunch ehh... Needs a little work there.. Seems the sound like a to cut in and out a lot and especially if you exit YIHome and come back. Its sometimes unrecoverable without force closing and starting over. Not horrible but is a definite bug. The sound also cracks and fades out like a battery dying in a speaker when this happens. I'd like to ask a request and see if this could be possible. Would you be able to make the sound run in the background like other apps do for music. This would make YIHome even more amazing as I'm trying to open use the camera as a baby monitor. And always have my phone on me. It would be really great and very very useful! Thanks in advance! Liking the hardware so far! Definitely see potential in YIHome !!

by Mksandin

I’ve been using these cameras for more than a year and have loved them! But lately YIHome is sooo slow. I googled and found an answer that the slowness for notifications was because your internet is slow - so I thought - hmm maybe that’s causing the lag in YIHome as well. So I did a speed test and my internet speeds are great! But my app will be loading for several minutes and either it’ll just stop loading (and never complete) or sometimes after several minutes it will pull up my cameras. Then getting into one of the cameras to watch a video is the same thing... several minutes later I’m still waiting on it to load for a 10 second clip. So half the time I can’t even check in and the other half it takes so long it’s useless. Additionally, I tried removing YIHome and adding it back - after signing back into my profile I can’t get to ANY of my cameras. What is happening?? I loved these cameras. Please fix whatever is causing this.

by Yi-meh

I love the outdoor cameras and have several on our house as well as some Yi cams inside. The outdoor cameras will beep at a person walking near them and is a great safety feature as it lets the person know there is a camera looking at them. The only downside is the expensive cloud storage and the issues I had setting up cloud storage for more than one device. I have about 10 of these and would need to have 10 different accounts to set it up properly. Maybe this is corrected now but when i tried it was as stated above. I have had one outside camera fail but it still lasted nearly a year outside in a very rainy area and fully exposed to sun.
There is NO IPAD app and it is very annoying that I cannot view the cameras on my ipad or computer. Other camera manufacturers are catching up with Yi! Such as Wyze and have surpassed them in the software category. I still like the Yi! Cams but there are issues that make me want to find something better.

by Kilaro34

I’m very impressed by the quality of the video this camera has. We got the YI Dome camera as a gift mainly to use as a baby monitor. Impressed how super easy it is to setup. No instruction manual but I assumed YIHome would guide me. However other non-tech savvy people may have issues knowing how to get started. When I looked up the price to order another for the baby’s room I couldn’t believe how affordable this camera was. I paid $165 for a baby monitor and the quality of the video isn’t as clear or colorful as the YI Dome. Very happy with this product. I haven’t tried the night vision yet but noticed the intercom is pretty loud & clear. I noticed a lag in the video by a few seconds and same with the audio. However I’m just using this for the baby so I can watch him with our babysitter while I’m at work. This puts my mind at ease. I’m already ordering more cameras for the home as we have a new baby. I’ve been meaning to also get a new action camera & after seeing the easy setup & quality of the YI Dome, I look forward to trying the YI 4K Action Camera as well. Looks like I’m a new YI Fan.

by Ct214

Great app. Have had much better experience with this than previous brands I have used. Easy to navigate. Camera setup is SO easy, and navigating YIHome is simple and works great 99% of the time.

They seem to be constantly developing the platform. I do wish there were more options for visualizing available cameras, like reordering in the list and using smaller thumbnails to be able to choose the one you want more quickly. Folders would be cool to create group “dashboards” like thumbnails in a folder so you could choose a folder as quickly move from camera to camera within that group. I would even like to see the grouping feature available on the computer app. Finally, I do hope you guys develop more options for local storage, like NVR or the ability to record to a local hard drive.

by Fotogfred

Just received a four-camera system (one day ahead of scheduled delivery by UPS) and had very few problems activating the first camera, with a 32mb card. Biggest difficulty was trying to download the Yi software and hook up to internet—which was not necessarily a fault of the manufacturers. The accompanying brochure (folder) could have been clearer in pointing out the various steps needed to get the system up and running—really couldn’t find most of the “settings” (adjustments and personal preferences) until got the camera and iPad keyboard software running, when I could manipulate sliders and push buttons right on my iPad. Perhaps the manufacturers could spend a few more development bucks to have a decent manual written and printed. (I just happen to know a writer/editor who could be approached about originating such a manual.). Can’t wait til I have the whole system up and running!

by Kpop1

I am amazed at the quality of the cameras, the various settings for the cams and the cloud service. I had issues with my internet, yet the backup memory cards were uploaded once I was back on line.
Changing your internet password requires you to physically reset and then rescan each camera. I thought this was a big disadvantage, however I now realize it is actually better security. Only pain would be if installed cams required a ladder to reach them. NOT being able to delete the videos from the cloud is also a GREAT security feature.
Haven’t tried the last update, but hopefully the ability to fast forward/pause the playback was or will be added. I realize that we all want everything for very little price. Not having this feature obviously did not affect my rating. These cams, YIHome , and customer service (especially Drew and Tim) are all outstanding. Thank you!

by Chaldin806

I have tried several wifi cameras and I was OK with the ones I had purchased before from another brand... Until I came across the Yi cameras, placed the order for the 1080 Yi Cameras pack of 4... Opening experience was great...I was disappointed that mounting brackets didn't come with the cameras..had to order them for around $13 dollars... Connectivity and app use was flawless, over the last 3 days I haven't had a single issue with connection... I suggest to add in the description that certain micro sd card must be purchased or include it with the package (add the cost of the Micro sd card) if you don't use a high speed card max of 32g but I have tried 64g and it worked you will have issues retriving video!! YES YIHome is great let's you view recorded video on the camera (micro sd card) great video and two was communication hands free or intercom... The video lags 5-10 seconds from real time... Motion sensors alerts work great... Overall Great cameras!!!

by Nurse In Ak

My mother was terminally ill. I would worry so much while I was at work not knowing if she was safe or needed help. Also, most of her children and grandchildren lived in Alaska and, even though they visited as much as they could, there was no way to know when she would pass. We are very close and my mom was very much loved by all. When my friend at work heard of my situation she told my of your product. I received it super fast, was surprised I got 2 cameras, was blown away by the ease of setup and my nights away from home were no longer stressful. Then I realized I could share the link to the camera with the family in Alaska and suddenly we were connected. That in itself was so incredible but your company did not charge my family. We had 9 shared links which allowed over 20 people be involved in our mom’s daily life and even share in her last moments including her last breath. Your product and company is so wonderful and we will continue to spread the word of you! Thank you from all of us!

by RickyL12

I purchased the outdoor camera and everything was fine after the free trial. I purchased the 3 month cloud service once and it worked fine. When my previous subscription expired, I purchased an extra 3 month cloud subscription but YIHome was not working properly. I was charged for a service didn't get, however Apple issued a refund. I attempted to purchase the cloud subscription one more time and the system failed again. I was charged one more time and didn't get any service. Contacted Apple again and they refused to issue a refund after showing them that I was charged. Contacted YI customer service and explained to them the issue. Showed them proof that I was charged for the subscription and they sent me a screenshoot that shows all of my purchase attempts and they showed as null or payment failed. My payment did not failed, they did. I was charged and both Apple and YI are failing to return my money for a service I paid for and didn't get.

by Bmwdi

The learning curve takes awhile but once getting past that the camera does a wonderful job. I use mine for monitoring the Gulf of Mexico channel and to capture sunsets. I use it indoors through glass windows and it still does a great job. If the infrared lights are turned off it even picks up the boats at night in the channel. The 360 is a great feature allowing you to bookmark particular spots you want to focus on, however I wish there were a way to limit the turn to 90 degrees. Being that mine is inside I don’t like that it occasionally spots me in the room and records me, even though it is doing what it is designed to do. Sound is not great, but for my use that is t a problem. I love that I can remotely check live or clips by iPhone and that I can send clips direct to Twitter, Facebook and other apps. The clarity is remarkable and the colors very bright and vivid. My next purchase will be the outdoor model if this one holds up well.

by KjoeM

Just received my set of four cameras. It was pretty easy to set up. Everything went smoothly. YIHome walks you through the set up process of each camera. So far everything is in working order. For an inexpensive set of cameras, the picture quality is very good. The only issue I find is the speaker in each camera. If you try to talk through it it’s pretty quiet. One drawback to these is there’s no way to mount them on a wall. So you need a flat surface to put them on. There are mounting brackets sold separately but I will wait to make sure the cameras work properly for a while. The power cord do have length to them but they could be a little longer. I will give five stars for now but will update later after some time goes by to see how they’re holding up. At this point, I would highly recommend.

by Aidanlife

YIHome is simple to use. For a little like 30 dollar camera I am impressed with the things it can do

1: it can call the cops, EMT, fire services

2: everything is saved to the cloud so if your camera is stolen or smashed you can still rewatch the footage!!!

3: YIHome is simple to use.

4: the night vision is good!

5: heck did I tell you that someone cameras have baby crying detection! This is perfect for people who want to watch there baby

6: the LIVE feed has a few seconds delay but is very good for the price of the camera

7: The notifications are good they tell you the date and time and what camera motion was detected on. You can schedule the notifications too!!

8: I wish the dome camera can Motion track movement up and down. It can track left to right but dose track up and down I wish they can add this.

9: I wish the camera can work if IFTTT.

This is a five star report and I was not paid or told by YI to write this. I just think that there stuff is really good. I own 3 cameras and all of them worked so far. 1 camera is more than 3 years old and still works the same as new. Love you YI!!


-Aidan Heaney