Winix Smart 4+

WINIX Is hands down the best air cleaner I have ever used. It’s easy to know the air quality of your home and when the air filters need changed by using the WINIX app. It also lets you order your supplies online and has them delivered in under a week! Being able to program it’s use is priceless when you are a family on the go! My family has allergies and WINIX has them breathing quality clean air minutes after their arrival home. I can also turn it on remotely and be prepared when they are having difficulty. It makes being at home a place they can trust to have clean air and not have to use their inhalers on a constant basis when I am cleaning, washing clothes and cooking. Everything that bothers them is cleaned in minutes, the red indicator has them going to another clean room then back as soon as one minute it turns blue and they know that they are safe. It even took care of the neighbors burning leaves, turning red to let them know to move to our enclosed bedroom, where I have another WINIX air cleaner, then turning blue again to let them know the particles were no longer in the air and they could not smell them anymore. I love my WINIX Air cleaners.

The big question I had was, “Does the app do scheduling?” And yes it does! You can set up per day schedules which is helpful for me as a shift worker. It works fine after setup and is on par with an app like Lutron’s for their hub.

The downside is: setup is funky. Even with a newer Winix model, pairing to WiFi feels like a yesteryear process. There’s no NFC tap setup, no Bluetooth… Connecting to the purifier involves connecting to its own WiFi network during setup.

This wouldn’t be bad except the app doesn’t give a lot of feedback about what might be going wrong during setup. Upon opening the app, I was asked to give a location permission. I allowed it while the app was open, but disabled precise location. Because of this, WiFi setup wouldn’t complete. After some digging on Reddit, I found that enabling precise location would fix it and voila: I was allowed to proceed and finish setup. I changed the permission back once setup was completed.

I’m ok sharing location for air quality info, but I do think it’s funny that despite initially requiring precise location, the town I live in wasn’t even included in the list of places supporting outdoor air quality. I had to pick the nearest city instead.

I would really like to have widgets for quicker access to controls, and HomeKit support (virtually nobody has this) would be nice to have as well. I’d rather control the unit with Siri than Alexa or Google.

The air purifiers are decent but the app leaves something to be desired. It’s not the worst app ever but it’s not super user friendly or intuitive. Too many unnecessary steps. I can’t believe in 2023, we can’t rearrange the order of our devices! The one I use the most is at the end and I have to swipe and every device I swipe through lags because it has to load so it takes me forever to get to that device. I would have to delete everything and start over but with 5 devices, I’d rather not! Especially since the usage of each fluctuates.

All your devices should be displayed on one single landing page that scrolls if it needs to. Like little boxes with the image and name and a quick button for on/off or what have you. And then selecting the device box puts you into the further controls page. This would make it VASTLY quicker and like I said, I am so shocked this isn’t already how it is in 2023 which 99.9% of apps do this.

Please bring this app into current times! It’s such an easy thing to do!