This issue of Spotlight Cams not being charged by solar panels has been going on for about three months. The responses from Ring are weak at best. From all indications the fix should be simple. As a senior software engineer who used to develop software for aircraft, cruise missiles and other aerospace systems and manufacturing robots, I have some amount of knowledge about real-time software design and implementation.
It appears to me that the Ring software development team does not use professional software development methods or engineering disciplines. Who knows where the software is actually being created or what engineering life cycle processes are being used? Rapid prototyping? Ukraine? China? Who knows? The resulting software release numbers are not shared with end users. There are no roll back options provided. Nothing is backward compatable. It appears to be a write code/toss it over the fence/and see what works approach. No published software test reports. No offer of Beta testing by users. No open source opportunities given to end users who are able to review the source code and offer insights into potential solutions. No information given about what software language(s) are used as the source code? In short, Ring sofware deveolpment appears to be a totally ad hoc process with little understanding of real softare engineering protocols, configuration management or design control.
Jamie sold Ring for $1B+ to Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and then rode off into the sunset on his new mountain bike. Good for Jamie. Of course one of the hardest things to manage in a new company is growth and because Ring is now a teeny tiny part of Amazon, the issues and concerns of customers are much less important than when the company was first started. Jeff Bezos most likely doesn’t know or even care about the fact that Ring products are becoming defective because the objective is to put more and more products into the pipeline. And, as more products and increased interactive complexity is introduced into the product offerings the frequency and severity of resulting problems will become worse. Bezos may not even know that Amazon owns Ring. It’s of little matter or importance to Bezos that products don’t work. Microsoft was very good at this game. In the end the increased number of defective product offerings will destroy the company and along the way a competitor may take over the market and Ring will be history. For Bezos it won’t matter because Ring is juat a little afterthought to his bottom line and the loss would most likely help him to continue not pay any federal income taxes.
So, this little episode of a software glitch involving Spotlight Cams and Solar Panels is just the tip of the iceburg. If the Ring software folks can’t fix this little problem, their future looks very dark.