Updates to the Canary App

It’s been an exciting few weeks here at Canary: we completed shipping to all our Indiegogo backers and pre-order customers, we updated the Canary firmware via an over the air update, and we opened up orders for US customers on our store.

And if you’ve been following the comments on our blog, or checking in over on Facebook and Twitter, you’ll know that we’ve been hard at work on more product updates. Today, we’re excited to share some of the fruits of that labor, and talk about a few of the biggest changes to the Canary app since we started shipping back in January.

Read on to learn what’s new in Canary v1.1.0, which is now available to download in the App Store and on Google Play.

Setting your home mode

Since we released Canary (and the Canary app) into the wild at the beginning of this year, we’ve received a lot of great feedback from people that has helped guide our feature updates.

Some of the feedback we’ve received has been related to Canary’s mode settings. Canary has 3 modes: Armed, Disarmed, and Privacy and an auto-arm/disarm feature which, until this update, users were not able to configure.

We’re happy announce that you can now choose what mode Canary automatically switches to when you get home. For example, if you choose Privacy as your default mode when home, Canary will automatically switch from Armed to Privacy mode when any location member arrives. When all members leave that location, Canary will then automatically switch from Privacy to Armed mode.

As well as letting you change your default mode when home, we’ve also included the option to turn off auto-mode switching if you prefer to only switch modes manually.

To access these new options, just tap the mode icon from your Canary’s home screen, then select Mode settings. From there, you can choose Canary’s default mode for when someone is home, or choose to turn off auto-mode switching altogether.

Increased visibility of emergency options

Over the past three weeks, from various cities around the world, seven separate Canary users have contacted us to report burglaries. In at least one of these cases, the intruder has already been apprehended by the police. Hearing these stories has been incredible. Each one is a testament to the value that Canary adds in the case of an emergency—not only by showing you what’s happening but also by giving you direct actions to take.

With this in mind, we set out to make some usability improvements to the interface to ensure that the emergency options in the app were a little more clear and easier to find when you need them. With deliberation and attention to detail, we’ve updated the UI in the app to give more clarity and prominence to both the siren and the emergency numbers.

Panic widget for iOS

We’ve also created our first Canary widget to allow iOS users to access a couple of Canary’s key emergency features outside of the app. The Canary panic widget is designed to make it easy to sound the siren or call the police without even requiring that you open the Canary app.

The widget lives in your Notifications Center. Tapping the Sound the siren button will start a 3 second countdown before it begins (tap again to cancel). Once sounding, you can tap on the siren button at any time to turn it off. Tapping the Call police button will immediately dial the number of the police nearest your home.

To install the new Canary widget on iOS, swipe down from the top of your screen. In the Today tab, scroll down to the bottom and tap the Edit button. In the list of available widgets, select the Canary widget and tap Done. If you have any trouble installing the widget, please make sure your iPhone is up-to-date with the latest version of iOS.

Additional UI changes

To make it easier to find the moments that matter, we’ve added the ability to to filter video events by the mode they were captured in. From the top of your location timeline, you can now filter by All events, Armed events, or Saved events. And you’ll notice that events on your timeline now have either a green or yellow line across the top to show whether it was recorded while Canary was Armed (green) or Disarmed (yellow).

We’ve also made some tweaks to the air monitoring graph in the HomeHealth screen to mirror the design of the humidity and air temperature graphs. There is now more data than simply normal, abnormal and very abnormal, allowing you to better see nuances and identify correlations between temperature, humidity, and air quality in your home.

Stability improvements and bug fixes

We’ve been working hard on fixing issues brought to our attention by our early users, and Canary is now better than ever. We’ve made improvements to geofencing accuracy, Watch Live, and increased overall stability. As we continue scaling our systems, stability will remain a priority.

The road ahead

We’re very excited about this update and want to thank you all for your feedback and participation in helping us get to this point. While this is a huge release, and includes functionality and tweaks that we’re excited about bringing to Canary, the work doesn’t stop here. We’re focusing on improving all aspects of Canary, while continuing to add new features to provide an even better experience over the coming weeks and months (and years!).

There is an exciting road ahead of us and we’re happy to have you all as important members of the Canary community. Thanks so much for all of your support and feedback.