Suddenly not getting dings

[s-h-a-d-o-w]

I've worked on an app that uses the library pretty much all day and in the first hours, I always got dings that I triggered. But at some point, they must've just stopped working.

I went back to my first experimental script (and added camera.onNewNotification.subscribe as a second option - before, I only used camera.onDoorbellPressed.subscribe):

import { readFile, writeFile } from "node:fs/promises";
import { PushNotificationAction, RingApi } from "ring-client-api";

const refreshToken = await readFile("refreshtoken", "utf8");
const ringApi = new RingApi({
  refreshToken,
  debug: true,
});
const allCameras = await ringApi.getCameras();

ringApi.onRefreshTokenUpdated.subscribe(({ newRefreshToken }) => {
  void writeFile("refreshToken", newRefreshToken);
});

allCameras.forEach((camera) => {
  console.log(`Found camera: ${camera.name}`);

  camera.onBatteryLevel.subscribe((batteryLevel) => {
    console.log("Battery level " + batteryLevel);
  });
  camera.onNewNotification.subscribe((notification) => {
    const action = notification.android_config.category;
    const event =
      action === PushNotificationAction.Motion
        ? "Motion detected"
        : action === PushNotificationAction.Ding
          ? "Doorbell pressed"
          : `Video started (${action})`;

    console.log(
      `${event} on ${camera.name} camera. Ding id ${
        notification.data.event.ding.id
      }.  Received at ${new Date()}`,
    );
  });
  camera.onDoorbellPressed.subscribe(
    ({
      data: {
        event: {
          ding: { created_at },
        },
      },
    }) => {
      console.log(
        `Doorbell pressed on ${camera.name} // ` +
          new Date(created_at).toLocaleString() +
          " // " +
          new Date().toLocaleString(),
      );
    },
  );
});

console.log("Listening for doorbell presses.");

Nothing.
I used to get 1-3 Register request has failed with Error=PHONE_REGISTRATION_ERROR errors pretty regularly but now not any more.

I tried everything mentioned in the wiki about Notification Troubleshooting, without success. I live in Austria, so NL server is probably fine.

(Logging the camera name and battery level still works.)

[tsightler]

It sounds like perhaps you did not follow all details about handling refresh tokens as, without this, push notifications will fail after initial success.

[s-h-a-d-o-w]

I wonder whether the improvements that you're describing would truly change something. I noticed today (didn't leave the server running over night) that the token seems to not expire for a while anyway - seems similar to the re-registration that you're describing?

In the end, I think monitoring can't be avoided if one wants to provide something to users that might be less tech-savy. Or... let's face it, I myself would be pissed if I one day randomly realize that my door bell actually hasn't been sending notifications for weeks just because of some connection failing somewhere, some brief server downtime that messed with the token, etc.
Granted, I would notice because of the notifications on my phone. And maybe that's something to tell users - to not rely on my app as the only target for notifications.

[tsightler]

Being pissed because some project built on a reversed engineered API doing something the vendor doesn't support happens to fail sometime would seem to be pretty silly. If you don't want to use unsupported thing that might break, free, open-source hacker projects might not be the right choice for those types of users. There's no way you can design something that might not break, it's simply not possible, we don't have enough information about the API to guarantee and Ring changes stuff fairly regularly, we just try to keep up as best we can. The entire API might break next week, Ring could absolutely make our life more difficult or even impossible if they really wanted to (see MyQ for an example).

The reality is, the token is long lived, that why it shouldn't be a problem, as long as it is stored and the credentials/device ID are re-used as expected, it will work, but it's why handling tokens correctly is important. I personally have setups running since May that continue to use the same push token, no issues at all, even with dozens of restarts.

[s-h-a-d-o-w]

Well... while your argument is fair enough in a way, I think that if one can't build something to a certain degree of stability for the use case (in this case actually using it for one's doorbell for the coming years), it's probably not worth building. I'll have to think more about that. 😄

Thanks for letting me know that ring changes happen regularly. Because that's obviously not easy to tell just from a long history of commits or release notes.

[tsightler]

I don't think this project was ever expected to somehow be a 100% replacement for the Ring app, more just a supplement to existing features. For example, I created the ring-mqtt project, based on the ring-client-api here, so that I could automate lights, see snapshots and view events in Home Assistant, etc, using the existing Ring sensors for alarm/camera. If those things happen to not work it's not the end of the world that some lights don't turn on, but it's been reliable enough over the 6+ years of using it.

To be clear, these things don't break that often, there was a significant change in the API back in March of 2023, which forced us to being storing the push token persistently for re-use, before that, we just performed a new GCM registration, generated and new push token on each startup and Ring happily accepted it, although I sometimes wonder if it was our behavior that made them implement theis change. Then there was the big change in the push notification format as part of the legacy FCM API retirement in June/July (not really Ring making the change, everyone had to adapt to the Firebase changes), and now there appear to be changes due to new features like video notifications and some other features they are rolling out, although these changes seem minor and implemented in a non-breaking way so far.

Heck, back in the earlier Ring days I would say this project was more reliable that Ring infrastructure itself, but Ring has been pretty stable in the last year or so.

But indeed, any time you have a reverse engineered API, things break, and who knows how long it might take to fix it, it's mostly just two of us maintaining this thing and we both have have fairly busy lives, so this is just a side project we hack at when we have time, it's just that this side project happened to grow to having 10's of thousands of users dependent on it via various other projects. If your expecting something with professional level reliability, then you'll have to commit to making it that.

[s-h-a-d-o-w]

Again, fair enough. And none of what I said was meant in some way as a criticism of this project. It was purely about expectations towards what >I< wanted to create. My part, not yours. You're doing a great job with this library and the guidance you provide!