Ring doorbell and camera products have gotten a lot better over the years. From experiencing multiple power or signal issues to mostly offering a stable and friendly experience. But nothing is perfect. One of the latest issues affecting Ring products is a new error that seems to be relatively easy to resolve.
What’s been happening is that users have been trying to log in to view their Ring products via the Ring app just to be confronted with a connectivity error. It states “Couldn’t load your locations. We’re having trouble loading your Location information. Please try again.” telling the user to retry (or back out and give up).
There seem to be two common issues causing this. The most common being a VPN. We have been able to recreate this ourselves by enabling whatever VPN service we have active on our phones (ie, Hotspot Shield VPN, etc). When doing this, the app immediately dumps into this error upon opening it. However, if we disable the VPN on the phone, the app opens just fine.
The other common cause is app permissions. This one is more rare since users typically get a lot of use out of the app. So Android’s automated process of removing permissions from apps that haven’t been used in a while typically doesn’t affect Ring. But, you may run into someone who barely ever opens their Ring app. So in this situation, it may be worth investigating to make sure the app didn’t lose its permissions.
Then we started testing the app on the various phones to see if we could get it to break. Outside of purposely taking permissions away (which did cause some issues but not this error), the only thing that led to this error was installing and enabling a VPN. So that seems to be the most common suspect. So before you assume something is wrong with your camera(s) at home, make sure you don’t have a VPN actively running on your device (phone, tablet, etc).
If you are affected by this, it is unfortunate as it also means you likely aren’t getting notifications from the app until you disable the VPN. So, in order to make use of a Ring product, you have to sacrifice on your security options until this can be resolved (if it’s possible).
