You shouldn't buy the Digoo DG-UFC anymore

The DG-UFC IP camera has an interesting form factor, making it ideal for discrete wall mounting.

However, I could not choose a worse time to buy one...

Please note before reading this:

Digoo asked me to remove this article. Of course, that's not gonna happen. However, I trust that they do not want to repeat such mistake and damage their reputation further. Not all Digoo products are bad, certainly not, so let's consider this a lesson learned.

With its wide angle view, the Digoo DG-UFC could replace bulkier cameras where the Pan and Tilt functionality is not required.

With support for Onvif added in December 2017, this camera became more interesting for owners of a centralized security server like Synology Surveillance Station.

There are other small IP cameras out there but they either don't support Onvif standard, or they are primarily battery-based and not meant to stay plugged to a power source.

So what's wrong with the Digoo DG-UFC?

Most IP Cameras offer more than one method of installation, but the DG-UFC is a cloud camera and offers only one, and I hate this method to start with: you have to start by creating a cloud account via their application, U-Cam (publisher robert.luo).

The transfer of your local Wi-Fi access point details to the camera will happen only once that registration took place (after which you could add the camera to your server and should block it from accessing its Cloud).



Unfortunately, the cloud service behind that process does not respond anymore, and you will be greeted with "Network connection error detected" for any sing-up attempt.

From the U-Cam reviews and Digoo forum (where customer do their own tech. support), the problem started in 2019 and Digoo is aware of this with no intention to fix it! (they even serve the same answer template to all customers, see below)
Better still, they keep selling it, despite the dead app!

---

A side note on good practice

For the same reason that many people are hacking their smart Wi-Fi home gadgets, like Sonoff switches, it's good practice to limit the access to those cloud services and, when possible confine their traffic to your LAN. 

You never know what information the IP camera or smart switch will forward to its motherland. 

Also, like in this particular case, there's no guarantee that the cloud service will be there forever.

The diagram below comes from a previous review of a Digoo IP camera, which, like the vast majority of them, tends to be too chatty with servers based on China.

Most routers now have easy ways to control which devices have Internet access, often under the parental control section, or directly through their  network map utility, like the Asus routers.