HomeKit Camera Longevity: Nine Years, Six Cameras, Three Failures
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Six HomeKit cameras have been bought for this house since July 2017. Three failed early: two Logitech Circle 2 units within one to two years, and a D-Link Omna 180 in about a year after running very hot. Three are still fine, all of them eufy. Over the same period the smart plugs and sensors bought alongside them are almost all still working, including iDevices plugs from 2017 running firmware that stopped being updated years ago. Treat cameras as consumables with a two-to-three-year horizon.
Jump to where to buy →Every HomeKit camera bought for this house since 2017 has a dated order behind it.
What was bought and what happened
| Ordered | Camera | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| 2017-07-23 | Logitech Circle 2, wired | Died within about one to two years |
| 2017-09-18 | Logitech Circle 2, wired, front window mount | Died within about one to two years |
| 2019-10-28 | D-Link Omna 180 Cam HD (DSH-C310/AN) | Ran very hot, died after roughly a year |
| 2020-06-27 | eufyCam 2 kit, two cameras plus HomeBase 2 | Working. Cameras uncharged at present |
| 2020-07-12 | eufy plug-in indoor camera | Working. Currently unplugged |
The two Circle 2 cameras ran at the same time rather than one replacing the other, with the second mounted to a front window. Both failed. The Omna is covered separately in its own review; the short version is that it ran uncomfortably hot for its whole life and then stopped responding, with no diagnosis available.
The plugs and sensors from the same years
Everything below ran on the same network over the same years.
| Ordered | Accessory | Still working? |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 (direct) and 2017 | iDevices Switch, three or more units | Two still switching daily |
| 2018-01-03 | VOCOlinc PM2E power strip | Yes |
| 2018-01-05 | VOCOlinc PM3 smart plug | Yes |
| 2018-01-14 | iHome iSS50 5-in-1 sensor | Yes |
| 2018-01-03 | Koogeek O1US surge protector | No, drops off the network permanently |
One failure out of five, against three out of six for cameras. The iDevices plugs are the sharpest contrast: nine years of daily use, firmware frozen at 1.9.11, from a brand that was acquired and stopped releasing updates, and they still work every day. The iHome sensor has reported five sensor values continuously since January 2018.
Possible causes
A camera does more work than anything else in a smart home. Continuous video encoding, a radio pushing that video out, an image sensor, infrared emitters at night, all running around the clock inside a small sealed plastic housing with no fan. A smart plug closes a relay and then idles for years.
That fits the three failures. All three were mains-powered and always on.
It does not explain everything. The eufy plug-in camera is mains-powered too and it has been fine. The two failed brands, Logitech and D-Link, both stopped making HomeKit cameras not long after; the surviving brand still sells them. Era and build quality plausibly matter more than the power source on its own.
Six cameras in one household is too small a sample to generalize from.
What a camera failure costs
When a smart plug dies you lose a scheduled light and buy another one, but when a camera dies its view goes unwatched. The clips already in iCloud stay there, and you often find out days later, when you go looking for footage that was never recorded.
If you’re running HomeKit Secure Video, the camera is the only part of that chain you can’t easily swap. The hub and the iCloud+ plan carry on regardless.
How I’d buy now
Budget for replacement. Two to three years is the horizon I plan around for a camera, and anything beyond that is a bonus rather than an expectation. That changes which price bracket makes sense, because a cheaper camera you replace twice may be a better outcome than an expensive one that fails at the same age.
Keep the order dates when you buy. Every entry in the tables above came from a purchase record, and those records are what let this house compare camera and plug failure rates instead of guessing.
Check what a failure costs you before it happens. Which view goes dark, whether an automation depends on that camera’s motion events, and how quickly you would even notice.
What’s next here
The eufy cameras need charging and plugging back in before they are on the network again.
Where to buy, tested picks
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Common questions
How long do HomeKit cameras last?
The failures in this house all came early. Both Logitech Circle 2 units from 2017 stopped working inside their first two years, and the D-Link Omna 180 ordered in October 2019 made it about twelve months. The two eufy purchases from summer 2020 have had no problems.
Do smart cameras fail more often than other smart home devices?
In this house, yes. Half of the cameras have failed, while nearly every plug and sensor bought over the same years still responds, including hardware dating back to 2016. A single home is a small sample, but the gap between the two categories is wide.
What happens to HomeKit Secure Video recordings when a camera dies?
Footage that already reached iCloud is unaffected. Nothing new records from that camera, though, so whatever it was watching goes unmonitored until you install a replacement, and you may not notice until you go looking for a clip that does not exist.
Which HomeKit camera brand has been most reliable?
eufy. Neither of the two eufy purchases here, the outdoor kit with its base station and the plug-in indoor unit, has had a problem. The purchase table above shows how the Logitech and D-Link units ended up.
Runs the homekit.reviews test home, a real mixed Matter/Thread/HomeKit house. Everything reviewed here was set up, paired, and lived with. See how I test →