By Editor Scarlett Dargan
During a girls’ trip to Istanbul last month, my mum and I were at a swish restaurant.
I had spent hours poring over reviews and travel forums to find us the perfect spot overlooking the Bosphorus Strait: a view that has, since the seventh century BC, captivated admirers from Socrates of Constantinople to Mark Twain and Greta Garbo.
Perhaps they found it so inspiring because the cityscape wasn’t fighting for attention with a new, 21st-century marvel.
My mum took one look across the water, remarked it was ‘quite nice’, then told me she needed to check the Ring doorbell app on her iPhone to see if her Amazon parcel – a tub of dried mealworms for birds in her garden – had arrived safely.
My mum is not alone.
Ring, a subsidiary of Amazon, has sold millions of its £99.99 doorbells with built-in cameras, which provide a live video feed of your front porch from anywhere in the world.
You can also speak through it in real-time by using your smartphone, and rewind, rewatch and save footage – I’ve witnessed my mum meticulously spool back to 4am in order to watch my sister roll in from a party.
More than one in five British homes now have a video doorbell – and Ring is by far the most popular, with the company valued at over £1 billion.
The key appeal of these doorbells is, allegedly, security. A quick survey of the YOU office revealed that at least three people had received an app notification that someone was at their door, only to see someone trying to pinch a parcel.
Fashion director Sophie watched a man nab her delivery (‘Symprove gut-health tablets, no less’).
Luckily, as she has video evidence to send to the parcel delivery company, she could get her money back.
That aside, a disembodied voice shouting ‘I can see you’ through the doorbell is enough to send most opportunistic thieves scrambling.
Then there’s the appeal of recreational snooping, be that on children, partners or employees’ comings and goings.
Take another colleague, Susan, who paid for an overnight cat-sitter while she took a mini-break.
ll was well until around 9pm, when Susan got a Ring notification and tapped in to see her cat-sitter, holdall in hand, clearly about to leg it back to her own place.
Susan hit the microphone and asked through the doorbell, ‘Where are you going?’
At which point the startled sitter jumped like (if you’ll excuse the pun) a cat on hot bricks.
After mumbling something about nipping to the corner shop for cat treats (at 9pm? With her overnight bag?) she turned around sheepishly and went back inside to finish her shift.
For me, though, the real draw isn’t crime prevention or surveillance – it’s entertainment. Less Big Brother from George Orwell’s 1984, more Big Brother in its Channel 4 era, when the then unknown Alison Hammond, now a TV presenter, fell through a garden table.
The lols started the moment Mum had the device installed, when, to check it was working properly, the handyman recorded himself crooning an off-key version of Lionel Richie’s Hello in charmingly broken English.
Unfortunately, Tomas forgot to delete the footage, so I spent the next two weeks replaying the impromptu performance on my mum’s iPhone and bursting into hysterics.
A colleague, Rosie, tells me that her friend Jane was pottering about the kitchen of her Oxfordshire home (read: multimillion-pound mansion) when she got a notification from the Ring doorbell on her front gates.
When she clicked on her phone, she saw two middle-aged men gawping at her impressive house. Jane was, initially, quite smug, until she heard the words, ‘God, they’ve done an absolutely dreadful job of mowing those lawns.’
The two men proceeded to wander up her drive, chastising her gardening skills the entire way. ‘I wonder how much a house like this is worth?’ one questioned, before whipping out his phone to search for the property’s value on Rightmove.
Finally satisfied, they trundled back to the street – but not before Jane heard their parting words: ‘Spent all that money on a house and still can’t afford a decent landscaper.’
Unsurprisingly, many people have started cashing in on this doorstep entertainment by uploading their clips to TikTok – basically the modern-day equivalent of getting £250 for a You’ve Been Framed video.
#RingDoorbell has a stonking 357.9 million tagged posts on the app, where homeowners share the hilarious goings-on they’ve spotted.
My favourites are of drunk people falling into bushes and random animals rocking up uninvited.
Last year, a man in Lancashire shared Ring footage of 12 lost sheep forming an orderly queue down his driveway at 2am, before heading on through to his back garden to hang out.
Meanwhile in California, a man’s Ring app captured a black bear ambling up to his front door at 12.45am, rising on its back legs, pushing the doorbell with its nose then running off with its pals. That clip got 6.4 million views, around half of which were probably me.
My mum hasn’t quite reached the stage of uploading her Ring footage to TikTok, but she does let us know she’s watching. A few weeks ago, she tasked us, her three naïve children (26, 24 and 20) with looking after the home while she was in Cyprus.
The main rule? That Ronaldo – her beloved fluffy Persian cat, who’s allowed out, closely supervised, for a few hours a day – must be safely locked inside by 7pm.
Unfortunately for us, Ronaldo is adorable – and cunning. After a few pitiful meows at the back door, we relented and let him roam free for the evening.
Naturally, we forgot about him until the early hours, when the garden had turned into a pitch-black feline obstacle course. Some time (and several scratches) later, Ronaldo finally sauntered back inside like a cat who’d just pulled off a midnight heist. We were relieved and puffed up about having pulled one over on our parents.
Then, at 7am, my phone buzzed with a message from my mum. Attached was a screenshot from the neighbourhood group chat, with a Ring doorbell intruder alert from 2.30am, and a grainy photo of Ronaldo strutting through next door’s garden.
Ring’s bosses can have my new marketing slogan for free: catching thieves, lacklustre cat- sitters and incompetent children alike.