Arlo Pro 2 - Bad week to purchase?

[JDCCROAD]

So I purchase an Arlo Pro 2 system 2 weeks ago. I'm about $1,500.00 into it so far and here are my experiences. Here is a little bit of my background first. I wanted a wireless system to keep an eye on my home while I am out of town. I'm pretty tech savvy as I have replaced most of my outlets with zwav outlets and configured it all to work with my SmartThings Hub. I also have Ecobee thermostats, a Harmony Hub, several Echo's and Fire TV's that all work seamlessly together. I chose Arlo because it was supposed to play nicely with all of the above.

I purchase a base and 6 Pro 2 Cameras (3 indoor and 3 outdoor) with power adaptors and a solar panel for one of the outdoor cameras. The system was very easy to set up as many reviewers have stated. At first, it seemed to work like a dream and even played well with my Fire TV.  Then last weekend there was a server outage, Then my Zone's all disappeared and could not be reestablished. Now my geofencing has gone to hell and I am getting 2 - 5-hour recording notifications for video's that are only 2 minutes long.

My question is, has it just been a bad week for Arlo or are these issues going to persist. I have researched every one of the issues on the forum and have tried all the fixes. I removed the apostrophe from my wife's iPhone. I removed both devices from geofencing and saved and went back and reenabled them and saved again. I have rebooted the base station. I've tried all the fixes but this system is buggy. 

Today I did not receive any notifications. While at work (50 miles from my home I logged into Arlo to check my status. Of course, it said my wife and I were both at home. We were not.

SmartThings knew we were not at home

My phone knew that it was not in zone

When I clicked the crosshairs it went right to my current location.

So I unchecked both devices and saved and rechecked and saved. Now it knew I was not in zone and my wife's phone was unavailable because it was out of sync I'm guessing.

So I get home and I start getting alerts. Now it thinks I am not home and has armed itself.

Here is a screenshot of what that looks like.

So of course, it records all of my movements on multiple cameras when I got home.

I finally had to manually disarm it.

I love this one of me in the garage. a 27-minute recording of me 13 minutes after the recording was shot.

Arlo can see into the future. It knows what I am going to do before I've even done it.

After spending hours on the forum reading through numerous threads I feel bad for James C. (I think that's his name). Tons of issues with no clear resolution or communication from Netgear.

Is it always this way or did I just pick a bad week to join the Arlo Community?

[RChobby]

Maybe disgruntled software engineers at Netgear, upset about the sale of the Arlo division?

[AncientGeek]

I think it is a bad week.  I have used Arlo cameras since the summer of 2015 and now have them installed at four locations with a total of around 27 Arlo cameras of various models.  Generally they work just fine, but there have been times when they have had problems for sure.  I use cameras from multiple vendors because they all have problems from time to time and I feel better with a heterogeneous installation.  They all have strengths and weaknesses as well. 

[steve_t]

Yeah, just bad timing. I guess it's a similar experience for anyone with Smartthings especially if you bought it for Xmas. ST outages have been more in the last few months than in the entire 2 years before that