The Ring app is now a must-have for all dog owners after this change

Losing your dog is often a panic-inducing event, and you immediately want everyone in the neighbourhood on the lookout. While most of your neighbours would probably like to help, they’re busy with their own lives. Ring is now leaning into that reality by opening up its Search Party for Dogs feature to everyone, whether they own a Ring security camera or not.

According to an announcement from the Amazon Newsroom, the AI-powered feature has already helped reunite more than one lost dog a day with their owners since its launch, but it was previously limited to Ring camera owners. With this expansion, anyone can now post a missing dog alert through the app and have nearby Ring cameras hunt for it, even if they don’t have any of the brand’s hardware themselves.

The idea is simple but effective. When a neighbor reports a lost dog, participating outdoor Ring cameras in the area automatically start looking for dogs that resemble the missing one. If a potential match is spotted, the camera owner gets an alert and can decide whether to share the footage with the person searching. Ring says this opt-in approach is designed to balance privacy with the chance to help a neighbor out.

Alongside the wider rollout, Ring is also committing $1 million to help equip animal shelters across the US with Ring camera systems. The goal is to help shelters use Search Party for Dogs to reunite lost pets with their families more quickly and reduce the time dogs spend in shelters.

Lost and found pets are already one of the most common types of posts in Ring’s Neighbors community, with more than a million such reports made last year alone. By making Search Party available to everyone, this appears to be an altruistic move from Amazon, but it also makes sense from a business standpoint. It’s likely to generate good publicity for Ring when pets are found, even if just at a local level, and one assumes the cost to Amazon of opening up the feature is fairly minimal.