August Pulls Plug On Its View Smart Doorbell Less Than A Month After Debut, Here's Why

The August View is completely battery powered, and doesn't require a hardwire connection to your existing doorbell connection at your front door. While that makes for an easier installation process, it seems as though the battery-only design may have had some unintended consequences.

"While we remain excited to bring this product to more customers, we are aware of some performance challenges in specific user environments," writes Jason Johnson, Founder and CEO of August Home. "In order to fully evaluate the user feedback, implement critical improvements, run further testing, and keep our commitment to you, we are pausing shipping of the August View."

Although Johnston doesn't go into great detail into what problems users are encountering, a quick trip over to Amazon shows that the product has a rating of 1.5 out of 5 stars (from a total of 40 reviews). That's pretty damning for a new product.

"Folks, I am not a beta tester but I sure as hell felt like one. Do not buy this, it does not work," wrote MadManYan. "I have the August lock and love it. I figured I would get the doorbell to stay in the same family. Big mistake."

"It takes about 30 seconds to load the live feed (they call it waking up the doorbell)," added Kyle Damian. "It usually fails to connect (even with a strong WiFi signal) to get a live feed and usually takes 3-4 tries."

The complaints continue from there with reviewer after reviewer panning the device and its performance. "There's a lag of about 5-10 seconds or so, but then you get a nice clear stream. However in my experience, this is the case about 5-10% of the time," continued KJ. "The rest of the time, it's just loading and loading and loading, then finally you get a message that the doorbell is offline or there's some other error message."

Most of the problems seem to revolve around Wi-Fi, which can sometimes be tricky for battery-operated surveillance systema. Perhaps August simply didn’t let its View bake long enough before it took it out of the oven, but it looks as though the company needs to go back to the drawing board.

August is giving customers two choices on what to do with their View. If you're like to keep the device AND help give feedback to the company on how to improve its performance, you can still get a full refund. You'll have to apply by clicking the following link -- this offer expires on 5/3/2019. If you'd simply like to wash your hands of the device and get something that actually works, August implores you to simply return it to the store you bought it from (it should still be under a 30-day return policy).

There is no indication as to if or when a reengineered replacement will be released.