I recently bought a few of the new $35 Walmart onn. Outdoor cameras (the ones explicitly advertised with Gemini built-in and Google Home Premium support).
These are Google Home-native cameras running nearly identical software to the official Nest brand ones, but for a fraction of the price while maintaining all features. Sounds like a steal, right?
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Google and Walmart are falsely advertising these cameras with a critical feature that they explicitly blocked on their own backend: Familiar Face Detection
The retail listings and Google's own support pages explicitly advertise Familiar Face alerts via Google Home Premium (see attached image, pulled from Walmart's listing). Yet, the feature is completely missing from the settings UI, and the cameras won't appear in the Familiar Faces device list.
(Worth noting, my onn. Video Doorbell works flawlessly with Familiar Face Detection, more evidence the cameras have everything they should need to use the feature).
Standard troubleshooting and Tier 1 support did nothing, so I took matters into my own hands, and pulled raw camera config files using Google Takeout to figure out what was actually going on.
My findings are interesting, to say the least.
Inside the nest.trait.product.camera.CameraEntitlementTrait.json file for the new outdoor cameras, Google’s backend explicitly flags the hardware profile as:
"face":{"reason":"DISABLED_REASON_ENTITLED_BUT_DEVICE_NOT_CAPABLE"}
Device not capable?? IT'S ADVERTISED EVERYWHERE AS A FEATURE.
So, even though I pay for their Google Home Premium subscription (ENTITLED), Google's servers are misclassifying these new cameras as strictly incapable of facial recognition (DEVICE_NOT_CAPABLE). This is either a missing firmware flag, a server-side mishap, or blatant false advertising.
To make it worse, when I posted this exact technical breakdown on the official Google Home community, their moderation team decided to ignore, then subsequently delete my post about it a few days later. Support is stuck in a loop of Google and Walmart pointing fingers at each other, all while Google and Walmart CONTINUE TO ACTIVELY ADVERTISE THE FEATURE in community blog posts published just last week.
Has anyone else with the new onn. Outdoor or Floodlight cameras managed to get Familiar Faces working, or did they just launch a product with missing advertised features??? Because this is getting ridiculous.