Blink Home Monitor 4+

Overall the app is fairly straightforward to use but I have a couple of frustrations.

Firstly I have to maybe every week or 2 log out and back in as I notice that I have stopped receiving any notifications from the cameras. The cameras themselves are still picking up the motion and record a clip but the app stops sending alerts.

Secondly and this is the bigger frustration, I have two cameras which over the course of a day record a lot of video clips, which is fine but I do not pay for a subscription and use a USB for local storage. It appears when doing this you have to manually delete video clips individually!! Rather than have the ability to select multiple then delete or simply “delete all”. This is really poor and I can’t help feel it’s an option that’s been disabled to try and force you to pay the subscription given how annoying it is to go through each clip slide to the left then select delete! This is an option that could easily be available but they have decided to leave it out.

I love my blink system, battery life is great compared to others like Arlo and Ring which I had previously. Picture quality is also very good and is better than the others.
Three features I would like to see in a future update. Sharing access to others would be great, where you can grant them full or partial access, other systems like Arlo have this feature. And the other is animal’s! So it recognises birds etc so not to send notifications for a pigeon! Again Arlo has the feature where you can set it to only trigger or send notifications for people, cars and ignore animals like birds. The other would be for the phone to ring when the doorbell is pressed so you can answer it live. Rather than sending a notification, by the time you get to it, the person has already gone.
Over all this system is so much better than anything I’ve used before including Ring and Arlo. The added features I’ve mentioned would set it apart from the other systems in this price bracket.

I got my 4 Blink Cameras a couple of years ago and had to start paying for my subscription last year. In the last 3/4 months the app has deteriorated to such an extent that it’s no longer worth paying for. The updates are meant to be improvements but they seem to be rushed through with inadequate testing. I keep getting unauthorised access messages. The videos won’t always load on my phone. The arrow to move onto the next video clip has been removed. If I want to watch a full screen video on my iPad, I now have to open the clip, enlarge it, the picture then goes very dark so I have to stop/start the clip to get the true colour, then go back to the beginning to watch it all and then minimise it, close it, move to the next clip and start again. What a joke, it never used to be like this. Sadly, I am now looking at alternatives and will be cancelling before my subscription renews.
Update, subscription cancelled. No improvement and no response from Blink on any of the numerous negative reviews. They obviously don’t care about their existing customers.