Review Insights · App Store
TP-Link Tapo
TP-Link Systems Inc. · 17,829 ratings · ★ 4.8
4.8
★★★★★
17,829 ratings
🎯 Build a better version
Top complaints - extracted from 21 negative reviews
Recurring phrases mined from 1-2★ reviews. The bigger the percentage, the more users have the same problem. Fix the top 2-3 in your version and you have product-market fit on day one.
1
"work"
6 negative reviews mention this · 29% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Baby cry detection is unreliable rarely work. No sound detection either. Baby cry detection is unreliable rarely work. No sound detection either" - Rosejkim
2
"every"
6 negative reviews mention this · 29% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Bad. I don’t understand how this app has a 4.8 rating. There equipment doesn’t work. Bought 5 cameras. One died quickly and they would. It warrantee. One only connect to the network once every blue moon. The app is a joke. Set up a door lock use…" - Johnx999999
3
"update"
6 negative reviews mention this · 29% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Bloated app. 1 GB for an app bloated with advertisements. Every damn update creates bugs with the widget not working correctly." - nwdcrob
4
"camera"
6 negative reviews mention this · 29% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Bad. I don’t understand how this app has a 4.8 rating. There equipment doesn’t work. Bought 5 cameras. One died quickly and they would. It warrantee. One only connect to the network once every blue moon. The app is a joke. Set up a door lock use…" - Johnx999999
5
"cameras"
5 negative reviews mention this · 24% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Bad. I don’t understand how this app has a 4.8 rating. There equipment doesn’t work. Bought 5 cameras. One died quickly and they would. It warrantee. One only connect to the network once every blue moon. The app is a joke. Set up a door lock use…" - Johnx999999
6
"tapo"
5 negative reviews mention this · 24% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Refresh. When you tap on the notification that there’s motion at the door, all it says is “refresh”. Even if you try to see old clips. I have tried this on WiFi and cellular and get this problem about 75% of the time. Sometimes a clip doesn’t sho…" - Bikeneil
7
"these"
4 negative reviews mention this · 19% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Hard to use for many Tapo devices. This app makes it very difficult to have many Tapo devices in your home. The reason is that you can’t organize the “Automations” that you create. These are what makes Tapo devices useful. For instance, connecting a motion sensor to a lam…" - Rumboogy33
8
"door"
3 negative reviews mention this · 14% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Refresh. When you tap on the notification that there’s motion at the door, all it says is “refresh”. Even if you try to see old clips. I have tried this on WiFi and cellular and get this problem about 75% of the time. Sometimes a clip doesn’t sho…" - Bikeneil
9
"doesn"
3 negative reviews mention this · 14% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Refresh. When you tap on the notification that there’s motion at the door, all it says is “refresh”. Even if you try to see old clips. I have tried this on WiFi and cellular and get this problem about 75% of the time. Sometimes a clip doesn’t sho…" - Bikeneil
10
"seconds"
3 negative reviews mention this · 14% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Functionally a mess. App logs you out randomly and settles on one screen only after 15 seconds. You will click an item and then it will load other ones and suddenly you’re clicking the wrong thing." - Cameronk35
11
"load"
3 negative reviews mention this · 14% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Functionally a mess. App logs you out randomly and settles on one screen only after 15 seconds. You will click an item and then it will load other ones and suddenly you’re clicking the wrong thing." - Cameronk35
12
"support"
3 negative reviews mention this · 14% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Ads, limited siri support. Annoying ads" - Milky Icecream
📋 All 21 negative reviews
Every 1-2★ review we fetched. Use the copy button to grab them all for your own analysis (paste into ChatGPT/Claude with a prompt like "summarize core user problems, group by theme, ignore bugs, focus on missing features").
Refresh
When you tap on the notification that there’s motion at the door, all it says is “refresh”. Even if you try to see old clips. I have tried this on WiFi and cellular and get this problem about 75% of the time. Sometimes a clip doesn’t show up until much later too. Very strange. I use TapoCare as well. Not sure how I feel about this.
Functionally a mess
App logs you out randomly and settles on one screen only after 15 seconds. You will click an item and then it will load other ones and suddenly you’re clicking the wrong thing.
Password Reset
60 seconds for a password reset??? By the time you receive the email it’s timed out.
Ridiculous.
Ridiculous.
Ads, limited siri support
Annoying ads
Baby cry detection is unreliable rarely work. No sound detection either
Baby cry detection is unreliable rarely work. No sound detection either
Still 1 star
Still needs a lot of work.
Hard to use for many Tapo devices
This app makes it very difficult to have many Tapo devices in your home. The reason is that you can’t organize the “Automations” that you create. These are what makes Tapo devices useful. For instance, connecting a motion sensor to a lamp. Because you can’t organize these in the app they appear as a huge jumbled mess which makes it very difficult to understand what does what. This gets worse the more Tapo devices you buy. So the company is essentially discouraging you from buy a lot of Tapo devices to cover your entire house. Seems like a bad business model.
Bloated app
1 GB for an app bloated with advertisements. Every damn update creates bugs with the widget not working correctly.
Ads ads ads!
Hundreds of dollars spent and still have to scroll past ads to do anything in the app.
Broken update!
The last camera software update made it so my SD cards weren’t recognized in my cameras anymore. Reseating them didn’t help.
Will not load
It will not load live feed, my partner is able to see everything and I still get notifications that it detects movement but refuses to load. This is the most annoying thing I just bought these about a month ago and it’s already having issues. I’ve had a ring camera set up at my aunts place for a year and have never had an issue with that one. Moving forward I will go with ring will never purchase another tapo product
Basically unusable
Takes forever to load up a stream from my camera. Sometimes 2-3 minutes. So if I’m trying to check for something, I’m going to miss it. Recorded videos most of the time just won’t load. I brought my other cameras over from the Kasa app because the Tapo doorbell I got isn’t compatible with the Kasa app (I don’t understand all these stupid names and why TP Link can’t just put everything on one damn app.) the Kasa app works nearly flawlessly. I can load into the same cameras perfectly fine on the Kasa app and then from the Tapo app it either fails or takes 2-3 minutes. Likely returning the doorbell camera and going with something else. This app is losing them a lot of money, I doubt I’m the only person on earth doing this.
Avoid updating at all costs
Avoid updating at all costs every time you update it unlinks all of your devices, and you have to disconnect and reconnect once again
BLOATWARE
Pare down the app size Devs, seriously!
Recently introduced ads
Update: every update makes it worse. More and more ads. I ALREADY BOUGHT YOUR PRODUCTS.
This used to be a good app for the security cameras I’ve paid hundreds of dollars for. Now I get ads and alerts that used to usually mean an update is ready now means there’s a new ad to watch in the settings menu.
This used to be a good app for the security cameras I’ve paid hundreds of dollars for. Now I get ads and alerts that used to usually mean an update is ready now means there’s a new ad to watch in the settings menu.
Terrible
Live mode will only work if I reboot the camera. EVERY TIME. So if someone is breaking into my home, I'm screwed because I can't even see what's going on.
Fix this trash.
Fix this trash.
Bad
I don’t understand how this app has a 4.8 rating. There equipment doesn’t work. Bought 5 cameras. One died quickly and they would. It warrantee. One only connect to the network once every blue moon. The app is a joke. Set up a door lock user and you CANNOT go back and see what the code you gave them was. ABSOLUTELY would never buy another product from them ever. Bad products, bad app, even worse customer support. Pathetic.
Too many notifications - Updated
The app itself is pretty good. I originally used Kasa when we only had the Kasa cameras, but switched to this app since we purchased Tapo cameras for the rest of our home and couldn’t add them to the Kasa app. Kasa app was far better when it came to notifications. I have the option to only receive notifications once every 5 minutes when movement/person/sound is detected and the sensitivity turned all the way down to 1. This DOES NOT WORK AT ALL! I can get notifications as close as 11 seconds apart for the same camera/incident. It’s SO ANNOYING! This HAS to be addressed because it’s a major problem. It has me considering switching all my cameras, yet again, because I just can’t deal with all the notifications. I have tried finding somewhere to submit feedback about this issue, but can’t find the option anywhere. I’ve also tried to send an email about it, but the contact via email button takes you to a link that only provides product support. This isn’t a product issue, it’s an app issue, but there’s no option for app. You have to put in the model number for the product that’s having the problem. The search feature in support does tell you how to limit these notifications, but again, what is suggested there are the same settings that I already currently have and it just doesn’t work.
4/22/2026 update - this issue was never resolved, in fact, I stopped getting notifications at all ….. until the most recent update. The recent update now has me getting notifications outside of the timeframe that I have it set to receive notifications. So I get them all. Day. Long. & there’s still nowhere to report these bugs or submit feedback for the app. There’s only a product support page and it’s infuriating.
4/22/2026 update - this issue was never resolved, in fact, I stopped getting notifications at all ….. until the most recent update. The recent update now has me getting notifications outside of the timeframe that I have it set to receive notifications. So I get them all. Day. Long. & there’s still nowhere to report these bugs or submit feedback for the app. There’s only a product support page and it’s infuriating.
KL135 bulbs not working
Recent updates have made my homes KL135 smart bulbs not able to access with the app. Please help fix this ASAP!!
No longer work for older iPad
The last update killed my Tapo app. I am using the 1st-gen iPad for camera viewer so I can see who’s outside before I open the garage door, but the recent update completely killed it. Can you still make this to work for old iPads?
So many issues...
There must be a ton of fake reviews because this app kinda sucks in so many ways.
Sentiment summary
96%
Positive (4-5★)
1%
Neutral (3★)
3%
Negative (1-2★)