Ring continues to be a sleeping giant in the world of local media and commerce. Though its core business is selling home security cameras and systems, a byproduct is having an installed base of 100 million devices – not just doorbells but security cameras – on which to build local apps and services.
We examined these principles recently when Ring decided to open some features of its Neighbors network to the public. Sort of like Nextdoor, this is a function within the Ring app that lets users post or browse things like neighborhood crime alerts, missing cats, or any other activity captured on camera.
Otherwise locked up for Ring camera owners, a publicly accessible activity feed from Ring’s camera network – and engaged base of homeowners – holds sizable potential. It could be the next hyperlocal content, media, and commerce domain. But there are still question marks around the roadmap.
Ring’s latest move sheds some light on that roadmap. The company turned its app into a platform with an app marketplace. Like platforms often do when they reach a certain stage of usage, Ring has opened up the opportunity for apps to be developed – via public SDK – to reach all those users.
Touchpoints
Ring’s new app store will let developers create touchpoints for any function that benefits from tapping into a network of local devices and cameras. This could be existing apps and businesses (think: Doordash), or new businesses that are natively primed to build a use case on top of a camera network.
For example, fitting applications could be elder care, retail optimization, or lost pets. These apps would be driven by the same incentives that motivate any developer to devote resources to create an iPhone app. The difference is use-case variations that tap into a stationary and camera-based devices.
A few apps that have already been built include:
- An app called Routines focuses on elder care. It lets families keep an eye on aging parents or similar, and be alerted to things like falls or pattern-recognized changes in routines. This is amplified by Ring’s recent AI-integrations (more on those in a bit).
- An app from QueueFlow helps businesses understand customer flow, wait times, and other dynamics that can help them optimize store layouts, order systems, throughput, or other logistics.
- An app from Minut helps Airbnb hosts monitor their properties. These tap into camera-less sensors in Ring devices. In other words, they aren’t recording guest footage but rather tracking machine-readable variables like temperature or noise levels.
As for Ring’s revenue model around this platform, it will take a customary revenue share for things like in-app purchases or subscriptions for services that are delivered by these new apps. This will be a 10 percent platform fee at the onset, which could evolve over time as it feels its way into the business.
Next Battleground
Stepping back, one potential tailwind for Ring’s platform move is AI, as noted. This coincides with Ring’s integration of computer vision and machine learning to offer Ring users descriptive alerts (“Someone is sitting on the couch in the living room.”). The SDK behind this app store could offer similar capabilities.
But of course one giant red flag is raised in all the above: privacy. Here, Ring is careful about the potential privacy backlash that its platform move could spark. The above app examples and others are a potential minefield of privacy issues. So Ring is putting platform guardrails in place from the start.
This can involve non-camera sensors, as in the Airbnb example, and other anonymized tracking. In the above QueueFlow app for example, faces aren’t tracked but rather patterns of movement (think of it like a heat map). Altogether, no facial recognition or license plate readers are allowed on the platform.
Either way, Ring’s open app store could crowdsource innovation that unlocks the platform’s potential. We’ll likely see other apps develop, again driven by that installed base of 100 million cameras. There are 15 apps already but expect a long tail of others to follow, marking the next battleground in local media.
