Onelink Home by First Alert

Constant false alarms from the devices themselves. The silence alarm function in the app has never worked. Not once. Most times, the app does not even show that the alarm is going off at all.

The fresh start process is terrible sometimes takes multiple resets of each detector to add them. False alarms from days ago still show up in the app with no way to remove them. Sometimes my lighting selections do not apply to the detector in the whole system can be rather buggy. I should be able to see easily at a glance if all of my detectors have the latest firmware update and there should be a button to check for updates. I should also be able to rearrange the order of the detectors in the app. When are new features going to be added? And when are the existing features going to be further improved?

What good is a system that no longer operates correctly because your units are No longer supported by the app. I still have 4 yrs left on my smoke/carbon monoxide detectors but can not be managed or monitored because of the app. I think first alert should be responsible for costs that I will incur to replace their units with units that actually work with their app.

I’ve used this app and alarms for a little over a year. A quick Google search or a scroll through Amazon reviews will confirm just how bad this app and its related hardware is. One of these smoke alarms triggering a false alarm in the middle of the night is bad. Doing it two nights in a row is worse. Getting absolutely zero feedback in the app that anything is wrong is terrible. Nothing even in the logs after the fact. The app always reports a rosy “Everything is OK”. No. No, it’s not. As far as I can tell these smoke alarms are just night lights and the app only exists to change their brightness. I have zero confidence now that they will do their job and the app will ever notice. Trash. Trash. Trash. Go set your money on fire. Same result.

I placed my homes safety in this company and wished I hadn’t. I have 2 units linked and they are in HomeKit. I had them go off a couple times now as a result of pizzas dripping cheese in the oven. Problem is, an alert never pops up from the app or HomeKit. Also in the history neither one shows they have ever gone off. Don’t ignore all these 1 star reviews. They don’t work as advertised.

In April 2023, I placed my trust in the Onelink First Alert Detector. What I received were nights of sheer terror. At 4 am, the device let out a jarring false alarm. As if that wasn’t enough, it struck again at 4:31 am one month later. This device had the audacity to display an “end of life” alert in just 6 months, a far cry from the promised 5-year lifespan. On the HomeKit subreddit, I discovered a plethora of users with similar harrowing tales. To make matters worse, customer support casually mentioned the product’s quiet discontinuation, suggesting a laughably inferior non-smart replacement. This product is a complete betrayal, turning what should be nights of rest into dread-filled ordeals. Future buyers, heed this warning for your peace and safety.

We have had multiple problems with many false alarms. The app is rarely updated and the alarms are crap. DO NOT buy these or use this app! We are going back to Nest Protect and getting a Starling hub to connect them to HomeKit. In eight years with Nest Protect we NEVER had any issues. A little over a year with FirstAlert and we have recently dealt with so many false alarms…including in the middle of the night! DONE with this horrible product.

I bought NINE of these smoke detectors, before reading any of the reviews on the app. I figured, as long as I got something HomeKit native, it didn’t really matter how bad the app was. Now, almost a year later I have a rock in my gut about this whole thing. Last week my wife’s asked what the alarm that had gone off was all about. I said I didn’t know what she was talking about. Then she let me know that the smoke alarm in one of our children’s bedrooms went off, but she didn’t hear what the voice said from wherever she was in the house. I never got a notification from HomeKit, or the native app. There’s no information about an alarm having gone off in any of the histories. Now I realize this is painfully common from reading other reviews. I’ve set up a ton of connected home gear in my day, and I can say with certainty that the app isn’t the absolute worst I’ve ever experienced, but it’s pretty bad and quite buggy. I’ve always felt that it’s inexcusable that you can’t turn the nightlight off completely. You might think that turning it all the way down to one percent is good enough, but I assure you; when you’re trying to get a newborn to sleep, every photon matters. The HomeKit integration seems to be basically useless. it’s not giving me alerts when alarms go off. from what I’ve come to understand now, even if it does, silencing the alarm remotely is horrifically slow. if I had to guess, something about the design of these detectors requires reaching all the way out to the Internet and back, which seems fundamentally against HomeKit principles. But even upon launching the native app, the splash green tells you that it’s downloading devices from the cloud. Those devices should be stored within the app, and remembered - that’s a really basic thing. All of this is to say that I will be testing these alarms to see if they actually go off due to smoke the next time my kids are out of the house so that I can sleep at night. Even if the app gets updated tomorrow fixing all of the complaints in everyone’s reviews, I don’t know that I will ever trust or recommend first alert ever again.

OneLink detectors with HomeKit are expensive, useless garbage. I’ve had one for three years. It was a pain in the bum to set up. It’s gone off four times, every time a false alarm with no smoke or fire of any kind. What has been a more regular occurrence is when the device mysteriously goes into setup mode. There’s no notice of any kind. Nothing pushed from the OneLink app, nothing in HomeKit, no device lights or chirping. The only way we find out is randomly opening the OneLink app and the detector is yellow and says it needs setting up. That usually requires a total factory reset of the device. When it does go off, there’s no notification in HomeKit, nothing from the OL app. Just the ear splitting alarm that can only be silenced by climbing up to it and holding down the center button. There’s a silence button in the app but it takes so long to connect to the device and then you have to apparently hold the button down- it takes five times longer than just using the hardware button. It provides almost no HomeKit integration. You can’t ask Siri to silence or test the alarm. You can’t ask Siri if the device is working. You can only ask if the device detects smoke. It won’t even tell you if it detects carbon monoxide using the EXACT SAME SENTENCE STRUCTURE. Even the room configurations are stupid. You can select “study” as the location for the detector but you can’t have it announce “study” if there’s an alarm. The only similar option is…. “Office”? Ludicrously expensive piece of junk.

These detectors and app are useless. The detectors have only ever gone off for false alarms. When there is a false alarm, they don’t send a push notification from the app. I have to open the app and manually reload it for it to recognize one of the detectors is going off. So that provides no value for alerting me of a problem if I were away from the house. Total garbage.