If my last post about Ring’s “Search Party” controversy didn’t make it clear, I have been walking away from Ring. I ditched my Ring cameras long ago and replaced the one floodlight that I had left with a Reolink. I was even willing to put up with them doubling the annual cost of my professional monitoring service from $99/year to $198/year as this newer price is more inline with everyone else out there.
However, I figured that I’d keep using the alarm since it didn’t really mean much in terms of their new privacy controversies. That just came to an end because the absolute final straw wasn’t just a creepy Super Bowl ad—it was a hardware “upgrade” that felt like a downgrade for power users. Ring’s new 3rd Gen sensors have officially ditched the local Z-Wave hub connection in favor of Amazon Sidewalk.
While Amazon pitches this as “effortless connectivity,” it really means your home’s security heartbeat is now dependent on a neighborhood-wide mesh network rather than the base station sitting twenty feet away. I’m not interested in my door, window and gate sensors “phoning home” every time I open a door, via my neighbor’s Echo speaker, so I finally pulled the trigger and moved everything over to Abode (btw that’s Abode not Adobe). It’s been a breath of fresh air to have a system that actually plays nice with HomeKit out of the box and has a great Home Assistant integration, keeps things local, and doesn’t treat my privacy like a community resource.
