Legacy systems have poor range. If you step out onto the back porch, you can often lose connectivity. In many houses they may not work from one side of the house to the other, especially older homes with thicker walls. Also, they are often poorly designed as most come with some sort of external antenna on either the camera or the monitor, that often breaks. Overall, the quality is very poor on most of these devices.
For mobile app-based cameras there are a few factors that impact reliability: phones have an operating system that will reprioritize its computing resources continually. Put more bluntly: phones aren’t designed to let an app (like a baby monitor app) run on it 24/7 with priority over all other parts of the phone.
Mobile apps can often crash due to code issues and cloud (remote servers) connections can often break and not be reestablished without an intentional reset. Considering the phone is the only monitoring device, these systems aren’t reliable because phones are often used for other things… like phone calls! If your phone dies or you forget to plug it in, there is no way to alert you of a loss of connection.
For all of these reasons and more, mobile app-based cameras increase anxiety of parents, instead of making things easier.
We designed Harbor to resolve these issues. If a Harbor camera disconnects, it alerts the dedicated Monitor and also our Mobile Apps. With many of these WiFi app based camera systems, someone can literally unplug the camera and you would never know it was disconnected until you go to pull up the camera video/audio on your app.