Netatmo set up pain

My Netatmo indoor camera has died the other day, which was a bit sad, but it did live a solid 8 years despite being dropped and handled roughly over the years. Some of this was because of the initial design where the bottom was smooth plastic, so it would take very little to make it slide and fall over. They’ve fixed this, and it appears to have a more grippy rubber bottom pad.

Anyway, so naturally I decided I’d buy another one. Well, I’m on day two of attempting to get it to set up. Part of the problem, imo, is that they’ve bought fully into a trend that Apple started where no real error information is given, and no progress information is given. As an example, I have managed to probably get it setup now. I’ve got all the way to what, I hope, is the last step. I’m on a set-up screen with a giant spinning circle, and it simply says “Setting up the accessory… It may take a while”. Okay, what’s awhile mean? How do I know if it is actually moving forward or is the roughly 30 minutes it’s sat on the screen a waste of time?

I can’t close the app without killing it, which will probably leave it in a bad state. I seem to have got the HomeKit setup in a bad state where I get a nondescript error saying I can’t add the accessory. Ironically, the first time I set up the device it appeared the HomeKit setup mostly worked, and the device showed up in my Mac’s HomeKit view. But something went wrong, I’ve had to remove it, and it’s gone wrong since then.

The bulk of the issues were admittedly not their problem. Turns out my router segregates 5 ghz and 2.4 ghz wireless connections. My phone was on 5ghz and the device only supports 2.4 ghz. At the very least highlight this, I’m at least a technical person and I imagine most people wouldn’t even think of this or even know how to fix it, so it just comes off looking broken.

After all, I didn’t even think of this straight away. Unfortunately, it sort of worked most of the time, every time I would click retry or start the process from scratch it seemed to change the setup process implying to me, you can get a dirty state, and it just won’t start from fresh when you start over.

Where I started putting things together is I realised my Netatmo Indoor Air Quality Monitor somehow lost its HomeKit setup. Of course, this required starting from scratch and factory resetting it. It had also got stuck on the Wi-Fi setup. That’s when I realised my problem was likely my Wi-Fi setup.

This along with some various bad state in the app that breaks windows and requires killing apps over all has made the process frustrating. It wasn’t this way before, it feels like as the app has got more complicated the quality is starting to fail.

The hardware is solid, but it does need to be updated too. The Wi-Fi issues could be solved that way and to be honest, micro-USB should not be used any more.

Oh, and please support the indoor air quality monitor better. It’s a rebranded weather station and yet, it seems to be excluded from the web dashboard and APIs. Its app is the least reliable of all the apps, and that could be resolved by using Weather Status, but I don’t believe the developer can support it.

With all of this said, I still very much enjoy their products, and they seem to make the best balance of quality and not trying to bleed people for subscription money, so I will stick with them.