Great, in theory
I have been using this app for two days, and it seems to be almost exactly what Im looking for. The log of when the dog was noisy and the ability to listen to a sound clip of that time of noice is very useful! And I love the great real-time video access. But I have a handful of problems that are leading me to look for another app with similar functions.
1) Battery life -- to run a monitoring session, the app must be open as the "dog station", which is no problem as long as you leave that phone plugged in. But the app must also be running on the person station device, at least in the background, which has absolutely killed my battery. I have not figured out how to record a log without having the app running in the background.
2) Inability to view previous logs -- once a session is ended, the app shut down, or the app crashes, you can not re-open a previous monitoring log. It is gone. It would be really useful to be able to look at preivous logs and see trends.
3) Timestamps/noisy periods -- on the log, it comes up with lots of litlte periods of noise that are about 30 seconds long. This is useful in that you dont have a long clip to listen to to see if hes barking, but it makes interpreting the log a bit complicated. The timestamps are not actual clock time, but the hours and minutes ago that it happened. This makes it hard to see trends of if the dog is barking at a certain time of day, etc.
4) Customer Support -- Ive tried to contact customer support to see if theres a workaround, but I havent heard anything back.
Overall it is a good concept. For those looking for a great video app to periodically check in on your pup, this does a good job of that. But there are also other free apps that can do the same thing. Running this app in the background constantly is killing my phone battery, even when Im connected to wifi all day. It would be much better to run the log on the dog station and be able to periodically log on and see how often/when the dog was noisy, or even check the log when I come home at the end of the day.
cplough about
Dog Monitor, v4.0.0