Ring App Not Working? 151 Bad Reviews Explain (2026)

We pulled the most recent 1-3 star reviews for the Ring app from both stores on 30 July 2026: 300 from Google Play (US) and the current US App Store feed. After removing duplicates and one-line noise, 151 unique substantive negative reviews remained, 90 from Android and 61 from iOS. By rating: 88 one-star, 40 two-star, 23 three-star.

At that same moment Ring held 4.65 stars from 555,722 Google Play ratings with 10,000,000+ installs, and 4.72 stars from 1,798,772 App Store ratings. The current versions were 3.109.0 on Android and 5.109.0 on iOS, both published by Ring.com.

One number shapes this entire piece. 42 of those 151 reviews, roughly 28%, are about an alert that arrived late or never arrived at all. Not video quality, not price, not the interface. The notification. For a product whose only job is to tell you someone is at your door, that is the complaint that matters.

Quick Answer

Late and missing alerts are the dominant failure. Reviewers describe delays of two to three minutes on doorbell presses and motion events that never fire at all. This cluster is twice the size of any other.

Part of it is fixable on your phone, and part of it is not. Android battery optimisation, notification permissions and Modes settings account for a real share of these reports. Wake-up latency on battery-powered devices does not go away no matter what you change.

There is a specific update-linked bug in the data. Five iOS reviewers report "This footage is unavailable" for snapshots and pre-roll, and four of the five are on version 5.107.0. All of them say it started after an update.

20 of 151 reviews are about the subscription, and the core objection is consistent: without a plan you cannot review recorded footage from a camera you already bought.

The hardest cluster to solve yourself is account and device lockout. Change your phone number or email and reviewers report their own doorbells telling them the device belongs to someone else.

Nine reviewers name a competitor they moved to or plan to move to, most often Wyze, Reolink or Tapo, usually citing local storage without a monthly fee.

The Alert Problem (42 of 151 Reviews)

Shares below are proportions inside the 1-3 star subset. Reviews often touch more than one theme, so they do not sum to 100.

Late by minutes, not seconds

Terrible as a door bell, by the time our notifications come through visitors are long gone. Video detection works when it feels like it.

not really as good as we thought. doesn't ring until two minutes after being pressed and sometimes doesn't tell us someone is at the door. pretty poor to be truthful.

Alerts 3 whole minutes after there is motion. Absolutely ridiculous, joke of an app.

There's is a delay in notifications. Two minute delay. Not always but half of the time

Note the phrase in the last one: not always, about half the time. That intermittency is what makes this so hard for owners to diagnose. A fault that happens every time gets fixed. A fault that happens half the time gets blamed on the wifi.

Events that never fire at all

I have a large delivery van sit at the end of my drive for a while, and I can see it with my own eyes and I didnt get a notification.

We just upgraded to the new 4k battery ring doorbell. I hate that no matter how many times I reset it or change settings, we DO NOT get any notifications. The wifi signal is really strong too. My old one did a way better job. $249 to not get any notifications.

My app doesn't function well. I set it up for motion, and it only notifies me about a third of the time... I get notified of people walking their dogs on the sidewalk but not when someone walks up to my doorstep.

we pay for the subscription to have the recordings and it seems like more often than not our front door is not catching people coming to the door. Often packages or things are left at our door, but we have no recording of somebody coming and dropping anything off.

the ring camera doesn't capture a video when the movement is quick and short, or it doesn't record the video long enough to capture all the movement

That last review describes the underlying mechanism better than the angry ones do. Battery-powered Ring devices use a passive infrared sensor to decide when to wake the camera. Waking, connecting and starting the upload takes time. Fast movement across the frame can be over before the recording begins. This is a hardware and physics limit on battery models, not a setting you missed, and it is the single most useful thing to understand before you spend an evening changing sensitivity sliders.

What Actually Fixes Late Alerts

Ordered by how often it is the real cause, based on what these reviewers describe.

• Exempt Ring from battery optimisation on Android. Aggressive power management suspends background apps, and a suspended app delivers its notification when it wakes up rather than when the event happens. This is the most common self-fixable cause of multi-minute delays on Android, and it survives some app updates but not all.

• Check Modes before you check anything else. Ring's Home, Away and Disarmed modes control which devices alert you. Several reviewers describe motion alerts silently switching off, and at least one says it happened right after an update. One reviewer put it bluntly: *"Auto update changed my settings and I lost 4 months of videos that were important."* Re-check mode settings after every major update.

• Look at Device Health, not at your router. The signal strength reading for the specific device tells you more than the fact that your phone has full bars in the kitchen. Ring devices use the 2.4 GHz band, which reaches further but is far more crowded, and a doorbell three metres from the router through a brick wall can still be marginal.

• Review your motion zones and person detection. Filtering to people only, or drawing tight zones, reduces false alerts and also suppresses real ones. Several reviewers describe both problems in the same review: constant alerts for a cat, silence for the delivery driver.

• Check the battery even on a wired install. Two reviewers report a hardwired doorbell refusing live view with a low-battery warning, one of them at 6%. Hardwiring trickle-charges the internal battery, it does not replace it, and a device that draws faster than it charges in cold or heavy-traffic conditions will keep hitting that wall.

• Reinstall last, not first. One reviewer reinstalled, cleared caches and followed every troubleshooting page before concluding nothing changed. If steps one to five have not helped, reinstalling rarely does.

What none of that fixes: the wake-and-upload delay on battery devices, server-side notification delays, and the fact that a car passing at speed will often be missed by a PIR sensor pointed at a driveway.

"This Footage Is Unavailable" (the Update-Linked Cluster)

This is the clearest version-specific regression in the data set. Five iOS reviewers report the same error string for snapshots and pre-roll, and four of them are on 5.107.0.

Ever since the update, snapshots are not working ('This footage in unavailable') and I know it's many of us since there is a thread on Reddit since the update. FIX IT!

Updated app 3 days ago, Doorbell pro battery preroll no longer works. Says 'This footage is unavailable' have to scroll past the preroll to even see the recording. Only having this issue on battery camera. All wired cameras preroll work still.

Since the last update I seemed to have lost the ability to see in between recordings and now I get a 'this footage is unavailable'. I've been able to see that since I've had my doorbell for years. Customer service was of no help and basically dismissed, saying this is common unless I'm recording 24/7.

Why can't RING do a decent update without screwing things up again! Suddenly now after the update my cameras have HUGE gaps and I have not lost WIFI or POWER!

The second review contains the most useful detail in the whole set: the fault is on battery cameras and wired cameras are unaffected. That is the shape of a software regression in how the app requests pre-roll from battery hardware, not a broken camera.

Practical consequence: if snapshots and pre-roll stopped working for you right after an update, do not cancel your subscription over it. Snapshot Capture and pre-roll are plan features, so cancelling removes them permanently instead of fixing them. One reviewer did exactly that: *"Camera keeps saying 'footage unavailable' as of the past week. Cancelled my subscription. Wasting money since it doesn't record properly."* Check your app version, report it as a bug, and wait for the next release before making a billing decision.

Cameras That Go Offline (13 Reviews)

The cameras are randomly offline way too often. My other brand cameras are never offline.

Same issue is occurring again The ring bell cannot keep connection to the wifi even though it's within a few feet of the router. no issues with WIFI with any other devices in the house.

cameras constantly going offline and there are no wifi problems, all other cameras working

The recurring pattern is that other devices on the same network are fine. That is genuine evidence, but it is not conclusive, because other devices are usually on 5 GHz while the camera is stuck on a congested 2.4 GHz channel. If your router publishes both bands under one name, splitting them and checking which one the camera actually holds is the highest-value thing you can do here. One reviewer also found that a router-level ad blocker and a VPN on the same network were involved in their disconnects, which is worth checking if you run either.

Paying to See Your Own Footage (20 Reviews)

The subscription is the second biggest cluster, and the objection is not the price so much as the shape of the deal.

hate this device its terrible app and devices dont see why people keep buying them. sorry but you pay nearly 130 for doorbell cam and you still have to pay to access your own footage its a joke

I was perfectly fine with Ring until they put up some stupid subscription stuff recently. You're telling me I have to pay monthly just to see who rang my doorbell?

The Ring Doorbell 3 has many nice features, but it doesn't work very well with the basic Ring plan... So, I ditched my Ring 3 and bought a Reolink with a 256GB SD card. It records 24/7 without a monthly subscription, and it works great.

When I hear the ring and open the app, I first get a screen to try to get me to subscribe. By the time I delete that screen usually the person is gone. So most of the time the device is useless.

That last one is a design complaint worth separating from the pricing argument. An upsell interstitial in front of a live view is a latency cost on the one interaction where latency is the whole product.

Two smaller patterns sit alongside this. First, several reviewers say AI features and trials switch themselves back on: *"I have no intention of using AI capabilities in my Ring doorbell camera. I have disabled Search Party multiple times, but with each update, it reenables."* Second, a handful describe strange alert behaviour after cancelling, including one who reports two motion alerts at 3am every night once their subscription lapsed. We cannot verify a causal link from review text, and we are not going to claim one, but if your alert pattern changes after a plan ends, it is worth documenting rather than assuming you imagined it.

If you are cancelling, the store-billing route matters more than the in-app one, and the Ring cancellation guide covers the Apple and Google steps that actually stop the charge.

Locked Out of Your Own Cameras (14 Reviews)

This is the cluster with the least self-service recourse.

i bought 2 ring video doorbells that worked pretty well at first. when i had to change phone numbers and start over with a new phone, i went to add the doorbells to the new App and it wont allow it because they belong to somebody else. 'REALLY?' im the same person at the same address

having owned camera and bell for years I'm now not allowed to connect them as they apparently are owned by someone else

I had to change my phone number and wanted to update my ring account but cannot because they only send codes for verification to the [deleted] phone. No other options exist to verify identity except giving them photos of your id and face scan.

terrible customer service. tried to take over an existing doorbell, put in request, waited 15 days.. still nothing.

The device-ownership lock exists for a good reason. A stolen doorbell should not be trivially re-registrable. The cost is borne by legitimate owners who change an email address, replace a phone or buy a house with cameras already installed. The practical rule that follows: transfer ownership or remove the device from the old account before you change your login details, sell the hardware or move house. Doing it in the other order turns a two-minute task into a support ticket measured in weeks.

The Neighbors Feed (8 Reviews)

Just posted active prowler on ring with videos. Ring denied posting

my post was denied, how dare I try to calm my fears

Please restore category-based neighbors' notifications. I want to receive safety and crime alerts, but OPT out of lost pets and other non-safety posts. The previous notification controls were MUCH MORE useful.

Moderation complaints are inherently one-sided in review data, since we only see the rejected poster's account of what they posted. The notification-granularity complaint is different and more concrete: a feature that used to have per-category controls now has fewer, and people who used it for crime alerts are muting the whole thing.

The July 2026 Authorised-Device Scare

One reviewer describes unfamiliar device logins appearing on accounts around 18 July, dated back to 28 May, and summarises Ring's public response as a technical glitch introduced by a backend update.

Check your authorized devices client to make sure it's only the devices you truly authorize... Edit: July 19, Ring made a statement and said it was a technical glitch. but still keep an eye on your accounts

We are reporting this as what a reviewer wrote, not as something we independently confirmed. The advice inside it is sound regardless of the cause: open the authorised devices list in your account, remove anything you do not recognise, and turn on two-factor authentication if it is not already on. A display bug and a real intrusion look identical from the user's side, and the response to both is the same.

Should You Switch?

Nine reviewers name an alternative. The reasoning is almost always the same two points: local storage without a subscription, and fewer offline events.

I also have WYZE. I guess I'll switch all cameras to them. Never had these many issues with WYZE.

Recent update killed all notifications. Not useful anymore, should have went with Tapo from the start

Worth being fair about the trade. Local-storage cameras move the reliability problem rather than removing it: an SD card fails silently, and a burglar who takes the camera takes the footage. Cloud recording exists for a real reason. If your complaint is the monthly fee, local storage is the answer. If your complaint is late alerts, verify that the alternative solves that specific problem before you rebuy an entire system, because PIR wake latency is not unique to Ring.

You can compare same-category apps by complaint ratio on the Ring alternatives page.

The Verdict

Ring's app is not broken in the way one-star reviews suggest. Two million-plus ratings averaging above 4.6 across both stores is not what a non-functioning product looks like, and most of the reviewers complaining here have owned the hardware for years.

What the 151 negative reviews describe is narrower. The alert path, which is the entire point of the product, is unreliable enough for roughly a quarter of unhappy owners to write about it specifically, and the causes are split between fixable phone-side settings and unfixable device physics. On top of that sits a subscription that gates the footage you would want after a late alert, and an ownership lock that punishes routine life events like changing your phone number.

If you own Ring hardware already, work through the six fixes above before you spend money on anything else. If you are still deciding, buy a wired model rather than a battery one, because most of the latency complaints in this data set come from battery devices.

Read the current 1-3 star reviews yourself on the Ring review page, check the trust summary at is Ring legit, or see the iOS listing separately on the Ring iOS review page.

Related reading: Ring vs Nest vs Wyze vs Arlo vs Eufy vs Blink ranks the major security camera apps by their complaint patterns.