Hik-Connect - for End user 4+

I am in shock reading all of these negative reviews but I think I know why. People simply don’t know what they’re doing. Nest cameras are no comparison to Hikvision. If your speed is not fast enough then you can’t stream high resolution. There’s a reason why you setup dual streams. My Hikvision NVR and cameras have never once crashed on me. I thought I had a problem with my Hik-Connect cloud account disappearing randomly from my phone but that was user error. My wife was logging into her phone with my account instead of me sharing. I’ve setup my cameras using the device connection and I get almost an instant connection every time. I’ve spent many hours reading and playing with all my settings, adjusting bandwidth and fine tuning the camera settings and I love my system. If you don’t know how to properly set things up then the commercial Nest system is more for you. No comparison with all the functionality and saving to your own Hikvision NVR to Nest’s cloud storage which you constantly keep paying for and again gives you no functionality.

I have hundreds of Hikvision cameras installed for clients around the country and generally have at least 200 on each of my iPhones. iVMS could easily handle this and was a pro-grade app. I could make my own views and quickly organize and view cameras that I need to see and switch between playback and live view with efficiency, which is impossible now. Hik-Connect is a very consumer non-pro app and the layouts take up way too much space, like they are trying to copy Ring. Totally unacceptable for us professionals and might be the end of Hikvision for my company. We monitor cameras live and respond to security incidents real-time though the iVMS app and this will be impossible with Hik-Connect. Now we have hundreds of thousands of dollars into installs and we cannot do our job. Our customers are beginning to complain and some are demanding refunds because we can no longer offer what we promised. What a disaster. I will never forgive Hikvision for this madness and absolutely cannot trust this company. Whoever decided to delete iVMS should be fired!!! This app simply does not replace iVMS and they deleted iVMS from the App Store and it is impossible to load on any devices now. Absolutely unacceptable and irresponsible. With all of that said, if someone was a very very basic consumer, the new app can handle a couple cameras around the house more smoothly than iVMS, but it totally screwed us!

I keep on making the mistake of updating this app. First, I could keep all of my cameras on HD. Yes, the cameras were choppy, but I prefer quality over quantity. Then an update made all cameras automatically display as Basic, and I then needed to set them to HD every time I switched cameras. So I tried contacting the company through the feedback feature in the app. No reply.

Now, this most recent update only displays one camera and I must manually add each camera EVERY time I want to see my cameras. Close out of the app? Add each camera again. Maybe I want to multitask, and according to Hik-connect I lose connection for a bit? Oh, that's means I need to login again to Hik-connect, and I then need to add each camera, again. I can't view the cameras I have installed immediately when I need to. Please, change the app back to what worked before. This current version is not an upgrade.

Ultimately, considering I bought my system to use on my mobile devices (like anyone else living in the 21st century), I would not recommend others buying Hikvision products until they fix the very methods you must employ to use those said products. A hi-def CCTV system is only worth buying if it's hi-def and a CCTV system. Not mobile friendly = not a CCTV system worth buying in my book. I'll wait to buy any more cameras (have 6, need 10 more) until this gets fixed.