I work in software for an IoT company. It’s immediately clear to me that this company, despite making an outstanding grill, made some poor engineering decisions with their WIFIRE module and system. Building firmware, mobile, and backend services is hard, so I feel for ‘em, but man, this was a frustrating user experience.
It took at least fifteen tries to get the grill set up over Wi-Fi, the last attempt only successful using a different phone running a different OS... Traeger frequently claimed the grill could not be found, despite the grill initiating its configuration and setup process. Mind you, the grill and phone were on the same networks the whole time. The grill then repeatedly failed to complete the “Downloading Files” step and remained in what appeared to be a zombie state such that Traeger couldn’t find the grill. Fortunately, it got far enough in the last attempt to allow my other phone to complete the setup, at which point the grill appeared in Traeger.
To the program manager, or beancounter that reads this... hire a software architect or a few more devs to build you more robust firmware, cloud services, and mobile apps. They aren’t cheap, but support incidents aren’t either!