Sentry & Dashcam Viewer officially working on the latest iOS app + holiday update (2024.44.25.2)

I’m really surprised this feature hasn’t been around long before today, even my cheap Arlo pet camera has had this functionality for years.

Your cheap Arlo pet camera probably doesn't have true end to end encryption and robust key management which would prevent the Arlo folks from being able to view your stuff. The Tesla stuff does. (With that said I agree that this is long overdue) edit: https://kb.arlo.com/3003/How-does-Arlo-keep-my-videos-private-and-secure-in-the-cloud -- they clearly don't have E2E encryption.

Probably also connected to wifi.

Anyone know how the app accesses clips? Does Tesla upload them to cloud storage somewhere or is it streaming it… or?

https://kb.arlo.com/3003/How-does-Arlo-keep-my-videos-private-and-secure-in-the-cloud It does look like Arlo does use encryption, my quick googling couldn’t uncover what Tesla uses.

I don’t know for a fact but I do believe it is streamed directly from the car. When first opening this area of the app it always says it’s connecting to the car.

"Encryption" sure, but not end to end encryption. In the context of the Tesla clips, E2E encryption means that the data is encrypted on your car in a way that can literally only be decrypted and in turn viewed only on the phone that is requesting it. Tesla literally cannot see the video even if they wanted to, even though they are ultimately relaying the data from your car to your phone. The Arlo stuff is transmitted over an encrypted connection, sure, but the Arlo services can see everything that is sent. This doesn't mean that a human being is watching it, but it does mean that they *could*.

End-to-end encrypted connection to the car.

What year S do you have?

Android will see this in maybe a year? Sentry preview clips don't even work...

I'll upvote that. With that being said, if anyone wants to jump in my pet videos of my cats eating, go for it. Like, subscribe, and all the cool things kids say these days.

Any idea how this affects the battery?

it’s a 24 Plaid

sentry preview clips are only supposed to work whenever the alarm is triggered I believe, personally never had it happened so I’m not sure whether it works or not

So.. the holiday update is out now?

it is being released in batches. one of my cars got it and the other hasn’t yet

You’re comparing a product that’s literally designed around that one feature vs a company that has thousands of other priorities to work on. It’s not a fair comparison.

Cloud storage for that much video data would be very expensive. I'm sure they're just sending some metadata for each video from the car to the app when you pull up the dashcam menu on the app, and then they send the full video data when you tap on a recording to watch it. Basically it'll stay stored on the car's USB drive, not their servers, and then it'll get sent on-demand to the app.

The vast majority of cars don't even have a built-in dashcam feature, let alone one that can do things like this.

I don’t understand the mentality of Tesla owners who compare features of the car to a completely different product. The fact that we got this feature in an update just goes over their heads.

It can also be accessed remotely right? (Not just when on same wifi). I have the car on parking level 1 (no wifi there) and live on the 4th floor. It would be a shame if i could only access near the car

They're completely spoiled.

yeah it can be accessed remotely!

Finally

Does a recording get sent and save in the app once sentry mode detects movement?

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yep. you gotta have premium connectivity though.

the recording doesn’t get saved in the app, you just stream all recordings from the car straight to the app. if the car has no internet you can’t access them.

Anyone know if there is a limit (like live viewing the camera feeds) for viewing sentry clips remotely (over cellular)?

I haven't used it yet, but I don't think it will directly affect battery. It'll likely just wake up the car (if it's asleep) to access clips. The car is already continuously communicating with Tesla when it's awake, so sending data to you won't add much more overhead to that. And it probably goes without saying but f you want active sentry clips, you'll need sentry on, which is its own thing.

Live view only works 10% of the time, and often crashes the stream if I change cameras. Will this be any better?

I haven't hit one yet.

Been working fine for me. I've been going through a backlog of saved clips this morning.

Premium connectivity required?

Do you have FSD on the car that got the update?

Does anybody know this would also work in the EU?

I have a model y without FSD and got it last night

Guessing you need premium for this?

absolutely love this. still getting updates on my stupid computer model y

Video quality is not so good

yes

I do not

Yes

Why can’t my car make phone calls without a phone. It has a microfone, speakers and a connection. This car is totally worthless. I could just as well buy a VW who also doesn’t do this and also doesn’t do alot of other stuff my Tesla does /s

Wait only on apple???? So Android users are chop liver? WTF! Sane as the watch..only available on Apple! Hellooooo Elon not everyone uses Apple/IOS

My exact question! Does anyone know why Android keeps getting shafted?? Same for access via watch!

I’d assume they have a higher number of Apple users and those take precedence. Either that or the fact that coding all of it for iOS is a lot easier due to the much lesser amount of devices they need to account for, much less investment. They probably release it as soon as it’s ready, without waiting for everything that needs to be adapted for all of the Androids.

With WiFi at home can you access without premium connectivity for convenience?

Unsure as I do have premium connectivity so I wouldn’t be able to test it. Hopefully someone else chimes in here for ya!

This. I just want to access my dashcam clips without having to pull out the USB stick.

Don't let the perfect get in the way of the good. It's better to release a feature like this, see the feedback, and then invest the time to scale to other platforms.

A year? Brother relax

Yea I would definitely like to see more feature parity between them. I think the only thing we've got a leg up on with Android is the NFC key on your phone as a backup to the Bluetooth key. We do have a decent cheap watch app, DRIVE Electric for Tesla that serves as a key and can do all the functions the app can. It remains to be seen what bones will be left after the API change though the key should still work since that is BLE and NFC already.

That's true I can lock n u lock the car with my phone on the b-pillar. Just trying to understand why all these new stuff is only heated towards Apple!

Doesnt explain the initial inquiry

Thanks for the response. Highly plausible!

Ok so I tried using NFC on my phone without any luck. As best as I can tell after they added local commands from your phone this broke the NFC functions on Android.

We don’t speak poor

Tesla probably knows what phone OS most owners have, and they targeted it. That’s it.

I don't think so. The clips the app saves aren't great, either. very low resolution. Just got hit by a car while parked and submitted a video I pulled through the app. We'll see if it's sufficient.

Don’t know why you’re being downvoted. The videos download in potato quality.

android os has different variants out there so its hard to find a perfect fit for the many flavors of android OS. apple has one OS version so its easier for them to code for that.

Yeah the Android app updates are generally just a couple weeks behind iOS. Yet people freak out every time lol.

Relax. Android app updates are usually just a couple weeks behind.

I've gotten the update, but I currently only have android devices. So it does not show up in the app, but since it's in the changelogs, it surely would work on iOS devices.

Just got the update myself today. It works in the Netherlands so that’s great!

Gotcha! But i am hoping it opens up for Android users!

Will hold you to that assertion...

Obviously there can be exceptions, but for 99% of features this is true, and I bet it will be true for this too. Why would you assume this update is different from all the others?

We're still waiting on UWB.

Cos not all have been integrated with android

That's a special case: https://x.com/wmorrill3/status/1832447216025530681

Because the update just came out and I just told you that it's normal for updates to take a couple weeks after iOS to come to Android. But they do always come. The only exception is UWB, which is taking longer because it requires a bespoke implementation for every manufacturer.

That is not a couple weeks.

You should use the USB stick directly and pull that video off.

I said that's a special case. Basically everything else is a couple weeks. And there's a good reason why this specific thing isn't a couple weeks.

This is great, just confirmed it this morning - this is something I've been waiting for for a very long time.

Do I just remove the stick or is there some kind of process where I eject through the console or reset the cpu?

Just remove it. Then u can download the high res files on ur computer.

thank you

Anyone know why it showed it up on my app once this morning and It’s disappeared? I already updated my car days ago and I was waiting for this feature but it only showed up today and now it’s gone when I closed the app again

Sweet!!! Can’t wait to use this

U just made my point!

I asked you why you think this update is different from all the others. Did you answer that question?

finally lol took them long enough to add this feature

Great update. This saves time when getting in the car and having to watch all the sentry events. Is there a way to get push notifications every time a new sentry event occurs?

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They don’t really care about phone for the entire operating system. They care about number of Tesla users, about making things compatible and secure. More than likely they have more iPhone than Android users, and it is a lot easier and less money/time consuming to code for iPhone than the thousands of different models with different hardware on Android. So they focus on and push out first what they can get out first. Like yeah they could almost just as fast do Galaxy phones and watches (there are 5 lines of Galaxy phones alone, with different hardware, and subcategories too, not mentioning non-galaxy models), but then every other non-Galaxy Android users will complain that their phone is not compatible. What about Google phones? Or Motorolas? They all have different hardware with different specs of security to them.

yeah wtf. it gets the job done to see if something happened, which i guess is the point. i keep a usb-c to a dongle in the car anyway to plug into my iphone, so at least there’s some way to get it quickly without going home and plugging it into a computer. they prob limit it for bandwidth reasons, but they couldn’t have given me an option to do better quality streams when the car is connected to wifi ?

it’s dependent on the connection. other dude prob doesn’t have good att coverage where they are

it’s prob shared with the live view cap too. the quality is super compressed tho so you prob aren’t going to reach it unless you’re watching clips every single hour

My app just sit on loading while try to get the clips

Android support got dashcam clips is out today! https://x.com/ArtemR/status/1906744647634084066 https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/tesla-motors-inc/tesla-motors/tesla-4-43-5-3224-release/

Android support got dashcam clips is out today. https://x.com/ArtemR/status/1906744647634084066 https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/tesla-motors-inc/tesla-motors/tesla-4-43-5-3224-release/