Every few weeks Key Delivery shows up as the far left icon on my iOS Ring app dashboard. There is NO WAY (yes I’m shouting that Amazon) that I will ever use Key Delivery and it is so annoying they keep unhiding it from my dashboard. This is an obvious advertising thing as the other hidden icons don’t mysteriously reappear. Only Key Delivery does. Ring, I’m one of your biggest fans. Amazon, I’m one of your biggest fans. Ring and Amazon, stop pissing me off!
Does it interfere with the operation of the iOS app? I ask because I’m on Android, and though there are ads in the app they’ve never interfered with my usage as they are in the menus or at the very bottom where I easily ignore them.
I think the ugly reality is, for profit companies are going to try and advertise additional products and services every opportunity they get. It happens in postal mail, email, and our phone apps.
The only interference is that I have to keep hiding it. This isn’t a normal advertisement. It appears with the other dashboard items like Neighbors, History, Alarm, etc. I subscribe to the alarm service/video recording so there are no other advertisements and if this is an advertisement, it serves no purpose. It just appears for no reason and tells me I’m not logged in. I then need to hide it again. I’m sure some genius in Amazon thinks that if they do it enough times I’ll say, “hey what a great idea, I should do that” but that genius should be fired because all it does it makes customers angry. Very bad business model. I would like to know if this is happening to other iOS users. If not I’ll contact support and see why they are treating me in such a special way.
Ah. For that row I have Edited to only show what I want it to show and the Key Delivery is a Hidden shortcut for me and I never see it.
Not sure why you can’t do similar for iOS. If it was an Android device I’d suggest deleting the cache and/or storage for that app. I don’t know if you can do similar for an iOS app.
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DonOfFlorida -
I have yet to speak to anyone who considers the Ring Key Delivery feature to be anything other than a ridiculous/dangerous attempt to LOWER customer privacy/security. Thus, you seem to be in good company in that regard.
You’ve also highlighted yet another example of how Ring software designers treat both the Ring app and Ring Neighbors app as marketing/sales apps instead of security apps. There is seemingly no reason whatsoever for Ring to keep changing the current status of various options/filters without the permission of the user. Why allow users to set any preferences if you’re going to keep overriding their decisions?
Engaging in such anti-consumer practices is not only rude and disrespectful, but dangerous. For example, do you really want to have an alarm wake you up out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night and then discover that the Alarm tile is no longer displayed on the Ring app Dashboard? Do you really want anything to distract you while you are (frantically) attempting to determine which sensor(s) triggered the alarm?
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All very interesting, but don’t you use iOS and if yes, do you encounter what the OP is encountering with the option continuing to come back after it is hidden? If it stays hidden for you, then as an iOS user do you have any actual things they can try to come up with a fix for them?
SolarEclipse -
Actually, I use the iPadOS version of the Ring app (not the IOS version).
Unfortunately, Ring has repeatedly changed my shortcut settings without my permission – which means I have to keep resetting them.
My latest experiment is to ensure all unwanted shortcuts are in the “Hidden Shortcut” section, with the “Key Delivery” shortcut farther down the list. Sadly, this strategy is probably unlikely to solve the overall problem (i.e., that Ring keeps overriding my settings).
That’s good to know.
On my Android I hid the Key Delivery as soon as it first showed up so months ago and it’s remained there ever since. Why Ring can’t make it stick on iOS is a mystery.
By chance do you have iPadOS updates or a Ring App update and then notice the Key Delivery icon back? I don’t know much about Apple’s world so just a wild guess.
SolarEclipse -
I’m not sure of all the mechanisms Ring uses for updates/changes:
- Apple allows users the option of controlling when a particular app update is installed from the Apple App Store, which is great.
- Ring prohibits users from having any control over the timing of firmware updates (or of even knowing the firmware installation date and version for a device), which is bad.
- Ring also seems to employ some type of (incredibly obnoxious, anti-consumer) strategy which allows it to constantly update the marketing/advertising in the Ring app – which causes all kinds of problems for users.
Because Ring users have so little control of the timing of updates/changes, it’s often difficult to know exactly what caused a particular problem. If a problem occurs immediately after a user installs an update from the Apple App Store, there is an implication that the app store update may be the culprit. If a problem suddenly occurs a number of days after an app store update, however, the actual cause is not as clear.
While I agree with the OP that the problem they mentioned is very annoying and should have been fixed when it first appeared… the Ring app has far more serious problems – such as the fact that Ring’s End-to-End Encryption feature has not worked since an “outage” by one of Ring’s so-called “service providers”. Since the Ring app is (supposedly) a security app, one would think that fixing a serious security threat would be a top priority.