Smart Lighting

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MQ
Please Enable SIMPLE Ring Smart Lighting Device & Group Sharing Capability ASAP!
light-settings

***A little background/story for the devs;*** Im a long-time user of both the Ring alarm products, and Doorbells/Cameras. I’ve used them for years and have *mostly* loved their functionality and the App interface for controlling them. Given that experience, and the ability to synchronize all of the devices above, I recently decided to jump into the Ring Smart Lighting ecosystem. I started by purchasing a few Solar Path lights, and some traditional A19 LED bulbs. After setting everything up and creating some automations to turn on our porch light every night @ dusk my wife immediately asked a very reasonable ?; “*Will I be able to manually turn that light off when we go into the jacuzzi on the porch?*” Assuming this system would work similarly to *every other* smart lighting system we have/use (*Aka Hue, Caseta, etc...*) I said “of course!” and promptly attempted to add her to the simple light group I had just created for my Spotlight cam, porch, and new path lights... Unfortunately, after telling her where to navigate in the app to see/control the new devices, and her repeatedly saying, “*There’s nothing like that in here*” I looked at her phone and realized; She wasn’t crazy, she in fact couldn’t see the devices! Figuring it was a permissions issue, I went into the settings pages on my phone to sort this out only to quickly realize what I needed to do was ***impossible*** because the *only* method for sharing lights today is by adding users 1x1 to ***each and every device!*** If you are someone like me with 10+ Pathlights and various other bulbs/spotlights scattered around the house, this means going into *each device*, *typing the users email*, and *sending out **repeat** invites*... As tedious as that is for the admin, it’s even *worse* for the user *receiving* these invites! They have 15-20 separate email requests they must open and ***individually*** accept, this is simply absurd!! ***All of that being said, my feature request is actually quite simple and common-sense and could be accomplished via any of the methods below;*** 1. Make restricting lighting access an opt-in setting: By default automatically allow users *besides* the initial person that setup a light and/or light group to control the light or light group... If a user wants to disable this functionality, simply add a flag for that into the existing device/group settings area. *This is the simplest and my preferred way to handle this, and frankly should have been present from Day 1!* **Or** 2. Add an option to automatically share new light devices/groups with other existing users during the device setup process: Add a checkbox along with the motion and other settings setup process that’s says “*Allow other users on this account to access and control this device/group?*” Given that Ring lights already allow *any* and all users to control them via Alexa, the necessary framework/API’s to enable group-sharing functionality *must* already exists, so why not expose them directly to users?? Additionally, if the concern is security, then why does Ring even allow ***all users*** voice-control, but not *direct* control via the app?! This logic is completely counter-intuitive and contradictory, it should be resolved ASAP! Hopefully you guys already have something in the works for this, if not please get on it! Honestly, I would love to dive deeper into the Ring Lighting ecosystem and stop buying these *crazy*expensive Hue lights/fixtures... but if you guys can’t properly implement something as basic as this, I will be forced to abandon this environment. This is simply not a long-term viable way to do business, this shouldn’t have even got out of Q/A as-is!

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16-03-2021 10:57:10

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