Ready to buy BI license but have a concern (mobile app reviews)

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staind204

Getting the hang of it
Nov 15, 2022
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I am just about ready to buy the BI license (great price on this site BTW) but reading the Android Mobile App reviews have me worried. Literally every review of the app in the last few years are awful. Do I have to have the phone app to get push motion detection alerts? Push motion alerts to my phone are very important to me so I want to make sure I will be able to get that working before buying the desktop BI app.

I saw a recent post in this forum about an app called "pushover." Does that work with just the desktop BI app or do you still need the mobile BI app too? Any way to get the motion alerts without buying more apps?
 
I use both BI app notification and email notification. With email notification, I get email alerts sent with my gmail account within 5 seconds, usually within a couple seconds. That is fast enough for me. I get so many notifications from BI and all other apps on my phone that I just ignore them all. Phone notification isn't very useful to me. With email I see all the alerts individually with pictures (or video clip if you so choose).

Notifications are cool at the beginning. Once you have used BI and received plenty of notifications, you will fine tune your setup and know what alerts at what time period are important and what you can just ignore or tune out and turn off.

The BI app for me is best for real time view of your cameras remotely.
 
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Futaba said:
I use both BI app notification and email notification. With email notification, I get email alerts sent with my gmail account within 5 seconds, usually within a couple seconds. That is fast enough for me. I get so many notifications from BI and all other apps on my phone that I just ignore them all. Phone notification isn't very useful to me. With email I see all the alerts individually with pictures (or video clip if you so choose).

Notifications are cool at the beginning. Once you have used BI and received plenty of notifications, you will fine tune your setup and know what alerts at what time period are important and what you can just ignore or tune out and turn off.

The BI app for me is best for real time view of your cameras remotely.
Click to expand...

I think an email for motion alerts would work just fine for me. I get a push notification from Gmail to my phone already. Do you have the Android or Apple BI app? I have an Android phone and the reviews in the play store are really bad so that's why I am asking. Thank you.
 
The only reason the reviews are bad is due to user error. The app works just fine. It takes a little networking knowledge (what is an IP address) that most of the users don't have as they expect to just scan a QR code and an app works.

With that said, the UI3 that is part of BI is more than sufficient for most people.

The BI app is only needed for push notifications or if you have two-way talk cameras because neither work with UI3, but for viewing and reviewing, UI3 is better.

But if you are securing your network and not port forwarding, with the BI app your push notification will not have an image. So most of us use the $5 pushover app to send a push with images to our phone. Then if we see something that is of concern, we VPN into our network and look at it.
 
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Daniel15 said:
Does the web UI have push notifications?
Click to expand...

No it does not, that is the only reason why people buy the BI app or use the Pushover app. Most find UI3 viewer better than the layout and configuration of the BI app.

I have the BI app and NEVER use it. UI3 is more than sufficient, and the Pushover app sends push notifications with photos.
 
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I've already got Pushover for various other notifications, so it's good to know I can use it for BI too.

wittaj said:
No it does not, that is the only reason why people buy the BI app or use the Pushover app.
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They should really add notifications to the web app. Most modern web apps have notifications - even this forum does. I know iOS devices don't support this well, but it works well on pretty much every other type of device.

On the other hand, maybe they want to drive sales of the mobile app by only including notifications in the app and not in the web UI.
 
UI3 was built and maintained by a member here @bp2008 and he has said something to the effect of it is not worth the effort and unrealistic because it would then require a constant connection back to your BI machine and UI3 would need to always be running in the background, neither of which most would want. Or something to that affect.

I am sure he will correct me for what I said, but it has nothing to do with driving sales of the mobile app.
 
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Daniel15 said:
Does the web UI have push notifications?
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No, not directly. The BI server will generate the notification based on some trigger/event. The notifications will be sent by the server in whatever form you choose to have them sent (push, SMS, email, Pushover, etc.). From there after you receive the notification how you go back to view the events depends on how the notifications come. Then you may go to view things in UI3 if linked that way.
 
wittaj said:
UI3 was built and maintained by a member here @bp2008
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Oh! I didn't know this.

wittaj said:
it would then require a constant connection back to your BI machine and UI3 would need to always be running in the background
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There's some code always running in the background when using notifications, true. It's not the entire webapp though - it's just enough code to render the notifications properly.

Every notification system needs a constant connection so that the server can push notifications to you. For web notifications, the browser itself uses its preferred push service to subscribe to the notifications. Chrome on Android uses Google FCM, the same system that native apps use. The server then sends the push notification to the push service, which handles pushing it to the device. There's more details here: Push notifications overview

Pushover effectively does the same thing, but they handle some of the required setup, which makes it a bit easier for a developer to implement in their app (and a lot easier to send ad-hoc notifications, for example from scripts) at the expense of some functionality. For example, you can't send actionable notifications via Pushover (where you send a notification that has one or more buttons that immediately perform an action without having to open an app)
 
wittaj said:
UI3 was built and maintained by a member here @bp2008 and he has said something to the effect of it is not worth the effort and unrealistic because it would then require a constant connection back to your BI machine and UI3 would need to always be running in the background, neither of which most would want. Or something to that affect.

I am sure he will correct me for what I said, but it has nothing to do with driving sales of the mobile app.
Click to expand...

It isn't a matter of the constant connection to BI or keeping UI3 open, neither of those things are true if you use the Web Push API which is supported by all major web browsers. The trouble is the Web Push API requires a "secure context" which means UI3 would need to be served via HTTPS. Getting and maintaining a trusted certificate, domain name, etc, is way beyond what can be expected of the average user. The alternative is to use a self-signed certificate and then users have to click through a scary warning message every time they open UI3. Which would be stupid. It would be possible to work around that using a cloud-hosted web server which all the notifications go through, but this would require additional development and potentially raise Blue Iris's web hosting bill.

Also the Blue Iris developer would have to do most of the work and it isn't a priority for him.
 
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Oh yeah, duh, I forgot it was about the HTTPS. I knew you would chime in with the details!

And for the NOOB, he does have a pizza donation link LOL

www.paypal.me

Pay Brian Pearce using PayPal.Me

Go to paypal.me/bp2008 and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.
www.paypal.me www.paypal.me
 
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bp2008 said:
Getting and maintaining a trusted certificate, domain name, etc, is way beyond what can be expected of the average user.
Click to expand...
It'd be useful to have the option for the experienced users that can configure it, but I definitely understand that it'd be lower priority.

I agree with you that it definitely makes setup trickier for the average user.

Let's Encrypt has made it a lot easier than it used to be, though! Free certificates that can auto-renew every 90 days. I've seen many beginners using a dynamic DNS service (like DuckDNS, Cloudflare, No-IP, etc) plus Let's Encrypt to self-host a few services. Another option is a Cloudflare Argo tunnel:
bp2008 said:
It would be possible to work around that using a cloud-hosted web server which all the notifications go through
Click to expand...
They already do, somewhat (e.g. notifications in Chrome go via FCM, and on Android they reuse the same connection used for web-based notifications in native apps), but regardless the site does need a secure context like you said. Pretty much all newer web platform features need a secure context as the major browsers like Chrome and Firefox eventually want all connections to use HTTPS, and are making the warnings for non-HTTPS sites scarier and scarier over time.
 
Daniel15 said:
It'd be useful to have the option for the experienced users that can configure it, but I definitely understand that it'd be lower priority.

I agree with you that it definitely makes setup trickier for the average user.

Let's Encrypt has made it a lot easier than it used to be, though! Free certificates that can auto-renew every 90 days. I've seen many beginners using a dynamic DNS service (like DuckDNS, Cloudflare, No-IP, etc) plus Let's Encrypt to self-host a few services. Another option is a Cloudflare Argo tunnel:

They already do, somewhat (e.g. notifications in Chrome go via FCM, and on Android they reuse the same connection used for web-based notifications in native apps), but regardless the site does need a secure context like you said. Pretty much all newer web platform features need a secure context as the major browsers like Chrome and Firefox eventually want all connections to use HTTPS, and are making the warnings for non-HTTPS sites scarier and scarier over time.
Click to expand...


Remember these would be some of the same users that cannot figure out how to get the BI app working that are negative reviewing it on the Play Store LOL, so this would be way over their head. Many of those same users that cannot get the BI app going also cannot get UI3 going!

TBH I am surprised they even figured out how to get BI going if they cannot get the BI app going. Typing in an IP address and username and password should be simple at that point LOL.

Plus we have seen many that have bought the BI app thinking it was a standalone app like Tinycam or something similar and wonder why the app doesn't work LOL...despite the About section in the play store stating "This app is a CLIENT for the Blue Iris Windows PC software. In order to make use of this app, you must have Blue Iris version 5.x installed and running on a Windows PC. Instructions for connecting this app to the PC software are found in the Networking topic of its Help file."
 
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staind204 said:
I am just about ready to buy the BI license (great price on this site BTW) but reading the Android Mobile App reviews have me worried. Literally every review of the app in the last few years are awful. Do I have to have the phone app to get push motion detection alerts? Push motion alerts to my phone are very important to me so I want to make sure I will be able to get that working before buying the desktop BI app.

I saw a recent post in this forum about an app called "pushover." Does that work with just the desktop BI app or do you still need the mobile BI app too? Any way to get the motion alerts without buying more apps?
Click to expand...
The blue iris mobile app will not provide a photo with the push unless you port forward (not secure), keep your vpn on all the time (not really efficient) or use something like zerotier.
If you want push notifications with photos use pushover. If you are still on the fence buy the mobile app for 10 bux and see for yourself.
 
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fenderman said:
Not quite the same. Surely you can understand why they are in separate categories.
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You can use other VPNs similarly to ZeroTier. I use WireGuard instead of ZeroTier and it shares some of the same traits, just not with a fancy UI like ZeroTier (on the other hand, WireGuard doesn't rely on third-party services by default) :)
 
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