Turning a Decommissioned iPhone into a UniFi Protect Camera

You could also use the ZoneMinder (open-source), it supports many video/image streams from cameras and provides detections/alerting

"Hi, this is Casey."

-Casey

If anyone does not listen to ATP, I cannot recommend that show enough. I'll add that you do have to have at least a tolerance for certain of the 3 hosts' assumptions, namely that one should be an Apple user for life. Not that they go easy on Apple, but they seem to be dedicated lifers no matter how bad Apple gets.

One of the hosts of https://atp.fm

The author of the article.

A long time ago, I used to work at a place that decided to stick iPads onto meeting room doorways to display who had the room booked (because people are the worst). These'd last 7 or 8 months before the battery puffed up enough to be noticed, or in a few cases to crack the screens. I grabbed a few power point timer switches, and set them to only over up the charger for a hour a day. Never had another battery puffing failure - at last not in the next 2 or 3 years before I left. (As the iPads got old, charging for 1 hour per day wasn't always enough to keep them running 24x7, but I'd set them to start charging at 6am so worst case was someone needed to power up the iPad and start the room booking webapp on it in the morning. If a particular iPad got its battery into a state where that was happening regularly, we just adjusted the power point timer to charge twice a day, morning and evening.)

Apple itself supports using an old iPhone as a camera for Apple TV Facetime and karaoke use, so while this is a risk, it doesn't seem to be something the company is concerned about.

https://support.apple.com/guide/tv/use-your-iphone-or-ipad-a...

oh that's fun. I had assumed ifruits would just decide nope if they can't see the battery

edit: that's a rather old v6 in link...think they started with their authenticating components after that

Not an expert on this but my understanding is that at 2+ risk starts to increase, especially that have seen high use and fast charging.

My layman understand is that dendrites accumulate over time so risk is incremental over use...and for phones use and time is basically same thing. Low use items I'd totally run for many more years.

I'm currently using an iPhone 13 from late 2021, so almost 4 years old. It's showing 79% Maximum Capacity in Battery Health, and I only occasionally use more then 75% of battery over a days use.

I still have the iPhone XR I upgraded from, so a 7 year old 2018 phone, that still holds a whole day's charge too (but doesn't get much use, and doesn't have a SIM in it right now so I'd guess it's powered down the cellular radios?)

I have an iPod Touch from a bit before Covid, so 6 years old from 2019-ish - it stopped getting daily use when Covid and WFH hit, so it's battery is old, but still in reasonable condition. (Pity newer iOS won't run on it...)

No. We have a couple hundred phones at work that are 5-9 years old. Does failure rate increase with time? Of course. Until you hit 5 years, the phone is perfectly fine.

Depends on how you use it, but with intensive use like 2+ charge cycles a day 7 days a week, and long times connected to charger makes 2+ years quite old.

i think you pasted the wrong link for the first one, it links to the parent comment.

Have they had a third party audit since a disgruntled employee did whatever they did? They had an insider threat situation a couple years back I think. I didn’t follow the story closely at the time, but I’ve supported end users and installs for Ubiquiti/Unifi stuff, and since that happened, I haven’t really been sure how much I should trust them.

Show me an alternative, then. Requirements are:

* flawless wi-fi

* tiny managed PoE switches

* networking UI that lets you document things (name ports and devices, etc)

* security cameras

* storage/playback for security video

* quick setup

* zero fiddling required

All this needs to be integrated and must not require fussing around too much, I currently have three networks/setups and my life is too short for manually messing around with infrastructure.

I guess you would classify me as a "damaged unifi enthusiast", while I'm just practical: this stuff works for me (has worked for the last several years). I'm open to other solutions, but they need to be more than just "possible" and have more advantages than "not being unifi".

I've been slowly accumulating Unifi gear and I'm happy with it, though my experience is mixed - the prices are relatively good for a unified ecosystem, IMO.

OTOH I've had two pieces of equipment die: an outdoor camera that shorted PoE pins because it really wasn't an outdoor camera, and the original doorbell that died after about three years of use (cause of death unknown, but I suspect a heavy rainstorm). Technically I had a third 48-port, 1st gen EdgeRouter Pro (750W model) that I saved from e-waste that died, but that already had quite a few years under its belt.

I still lean towards liking them. I have a set of 5 in-wall APs that have been functioning for 5? 6? years straight and still get updates and work with the unifi console. My Dream Machine Pro works pretty well for its purpose. I don't like that it doesn't offer more PoE+2.5G port options, and that only two ports are true PoE++, but from an effort perspective it's been so nice to manage.

All this being said, I think that their strength is in APs that are a good balance of tech + cost, and cameras which lean slightly more expensive but are trivially easy to manage locally and remotely. Going forward I'd probably skip unifi cameras and try to integrate OTS ONVIF cameras which will be a better value.

I'd avoid any of the large switching gear. I don't think that stuff is well-priced, and it lags a bit behind what you can find from Mikrotik and other manufacturers. It's not that important to have that stuff included in your dashboards, IMO.

As someone who might move into a house soon and wants wifi + a few cameras with on prem AI, what are the alternatives? Needs to be easy to setup.

Why are UniFi enthusiasts without moral reasoning?

This surprised a few people, but the latest official edgerouter pro firmware is 3.0.0 released July 28, 2025.