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Ring Indoor Pet Cam (2nd Gen) Review: Trustworthy basics for watching pets — with classic Ring trade‑offs

John Carter Doe

September 3, 2025

8.5

Good

What's the Real Story?

The Short Of It

If you're looking for a simple, reliable way to check on your pets, the Ring Indoor Pet Cam (2nd Gen) nails the basics. The video looks clean. Two-way talk is clear enough to calm down a nervous pup. And here's the thing: it has a physical privacy cover, which is a rare and genuinely reassuring touch. Being a Ring camera, it's obviously best if you're already in the Alexa ecosystem and don't mind a cloud-first approach. The trade-offs are probably what you'd expect. The most meaningful features are locked behind the Ring Protect subscription, there's no way to record video locally on the device, and you won't get any of those fun pet-specific extras like treat-tossing or automatic tracking.

What's the Real Story?

The Good Stuff

The 1080p video is plenty sharp for keeping an eye on things during the day and in low light. But honestly, the feature I keep coming back to is that physical privacy cover. You just slide it shut and it mechanically blocks the camera and cuts the mic. It’s simple, trustworthy, and you can see it's working from across the room. The two-way talk is also crisp enough to actually redirect a counter-surfing cat or help with some separation jitters. Plus, the setup is quick, the app is stable, and the motion alerts are dependable, letting you customize exactly what areas you care about. If your home runs on Alexa, this is hands-down the right pick—it just works so smoothly with all the routines.

Just a heads-up before you buy: you’ll pretty much need a Ring Protect plan to make this camera useful. Without it, you get live view and alerts, but no saved clips. At all. There's also no built-in local storage, so you can't just pop in an SD card. And Ring doesn’t support Apple HomeKit or Google Home, period. This plug-in camera also lacks those pet-centric perks like panning to follow your dog or a treat dispenser. Now, privacy is definitely better than older models thanks to that manual shutter and optional end-to-end encryption for your videos, but remember—it’s a cloud service, so keeping your own account secure really matters.