The reasons for notification push delay

[Aqara_PM_Donie]

Hello all friends,

Recently, many users have reported the issues of notifications delay. I would like to explain some of the reasons and the measures taken by Aqara.

1. All notifications have experienced delays: notifications from all devices in the Aqara Home app (sensor triggered events, camera detection events, system messages, etc.)delay, which is usually caused by message accumulation on cloud servers. In the past week, we found this situation happened on European servers, and Aqara has now expanded and upgraded the message processing capabilities of European servers. We believe that this phenomenon has been alleviated.

2. Only camera’s message delay: The notifications push mechanism of Aqara camera is as follows:

1. Messages that are immediately pushed after triggering, including ringing the doorbell, forcibly removing the doorbell detected, etc. These events are sent by specific sensors of the device, and the type and triggering reason of the events are clear, so they are pushed immediately after they occur. When you still receive delayed messages, the reason must be network delay or issues processed by the aforementioned servers.
2. The camera’s local AI recognizes messages, such as motion detection, person detection, etc. After these events are triggered, the camera first records a video of 6-30 seconds. When there are multiple event types in the video(such as when person detection triggers camera recording, but vehicles or pets appear during the recording process), the messages need to be summarized and displayed. Therefore, the delay time for such messages is fixed and not too long.
3. The cloud AI recognition message of the camera usually has a specific home guarding icon on the app page (I have shown the cloud AI event in red circles in the figure below), and requires payment to continue activation. Their detection logic is to first trigger recording through motion detection, and then send the recorded video to the cloud server for analysis. After the analysis is completed, the results are pushed. Therefore, the delay fluctuation of the classification message is very large and random, completely dependent on the time consumption of the entire process and the processing speed of the server, we have recently increased the AI processing capability of our servers to alleviate the bottleneck of analysis. Moreover, if this type of detection is configured with automation control, it usually affects the duration of automation execution (as it can only be determined as an event after the AI analysis of the cloud server is completed)
   
   

When you notice a message delay in the app, please first confirm which type of problem it is based on the above principle. For the message push logic of the cameras mentioned in the second point, if you have good modification suggestions, please feel free to discuss them in the comment section or feedback directly to me.

[johnsond28]

Great comms thanks @Aqara_PM_Donie

[denis.w]

Thanks for clarifying! This helps to understand!

[NLEmrullah]

Thank you for the clarification @Aqara_PM_Donie

[DEChrisE]

Thanks @Aqara_PM_Donie for the clear and accurate explanation

[cezary806]

Is there any plan to implement Local Push Connectivity in iOS (documentation link)? The hub, if it’s on the same network as the iPhone, could trigger a push notification without the cloud. It would make the notifications faster and more resilient to cloud outages.

I think it would greatly improve the performance of the pushes. Many people check their phone regularly when they’re at home - and that’s why they need the push notification to be as fast as it can be.

For example, if you’re on the toilet and someone rings the G400 doorbell, you don’t want the notification to be delayed a few minutes (at home = notifications should be immediate).
But if you’re at work, you don’t check the phone every minute and even if the notification is not delayed, you won’t notice. Or when you’re not home, you might have weak signal and you won’t suspect that Aqara has delayed notifications at the moment. Out of home = lower priority.

I think implementing Local Push Connectivity would cover most of the use cases.

Another benefit: if you give users an option to limit some pushes to Local Connectivity only, then it would decrease the load on the cloud, effectively making it faster.

For example, I have automations that trigger custom push notifications that remind me to close a window if it’s too cold and the window is open. I don’t need to get them when I’m out of home, so I could select “send local push” in my automation. Especially if I know that a local push notification is much faster, then it would be a preferred way to send push notifications in case of my automations.

I can elaborate on my idea if you want, I work in IT and have some knowledge in this topic.

[david]

I think Aqara should study how Home Assistant does it’s notifications, they are always instant and never delayed and on android you can have nice rich notifications with images and action buttons etc…

[david]