UniFi Protect, the camera side of the platform, had two significant releases this summer: 7.1 in May and 7.2 at the end of July. A lot of the headline features are aimed at big deployments (campuses, retail chains), but several land squarely on the small business and home owner. Here is what changed and which bits we think you should actually use.
Evidence verification (7.2)
The one with real legal weight. Protect now fingerprints video at capture with a cryptographic hash and signature, and Ubiquiti runs a public verification portal where anyone, including an insurer, a lawyer or the police, can confirm a clip has not been altered. No licence, no fee.
Why it matters: a camera clip is only evidence if the other side cannot argue it was edited. Until now that argument was hard to rebut. Now you export the clip, hand it over, and they verify it themselves. If you ever have to provide footage for an insurance claim or a dispute, this is the feature you will be glad exists.
Our advice: nothing to configure; it is on. When you export footage for anyone official, use the native export so the signature goes with it, not a screen recording.
Case management (7.2)
Group clips, notes and downloads into a case with a chain-of-custody log showing who viewed and exported what. For a small business this is mostly useful after an incident: one place to keep everything related to the break-in or the slip-and-fall, with a record that satisfies an insurer.
Second-stage AI verification (7.2)
Low-confidence detections are re-checked by a second model before they become an alert. In plain terms: fewer notifications for the cat, the shadow of the flag, and the headlights sweeping the driveway. This was the biggest everyday complaint about smart detection and it is noticeably better.
Our advice: if you turned notifications off because they were noisy, turn them back on after updating and give it a week.
Improved detection, PTZ tracking and 360° (7.1)
7.1 retrained the detection engine and added vehicle tracking on pan-tilt-zoom cameras and proper downloads from 360-degree cameras. Licence-plate reads at the driveway are more reliable than a year ago.
ONVIF and existing cameras (7.1 and 7.2)
Protect now handles third-party ONVIF cameras more completely: recording and encoding settings controlled centrally, time sync from the UniFi gateway, audio and motion events, and camera I/O for trigger-and-action automations. This matters if you already have cameras from another brand that are physically fine. In many cases we can keep them on a UniFi NVR rather than replacing everything, and swap them to UniFi cameras as they fail.
Point of Sale API (7.2)
Ties till transactions to the video of the moment they happened. If you run a shop with a supported POS, a refund or a void pulls up the footage. For a single-location retailer this is the feature that pays for the system.
PPE detection (7.2)
Alerts when someone in view is missing a hard hat or vest. Built for construction and warehouses; irrelevant to most of our clients, but worth knowing exists if you run a shop floor.
Mobile app improvements (7.2)
Frame-by-frame scrubbing on the timeline and home-screen widgets for unlocking a door or controlling a UniFi floodlight. Small, but these are the things you use daily.
Hardware that came with these releases
The second-generation UniFi NVR (announced with 7.1) doubles camera capacity and does forensic search locally with edge AI, no licence. The G6 Mini Dome is a compact 4K camera for indoor retail and offices. Both are now what we quote by default for new installs.
What we are doing on managed sites
- Applying 7.2 in the maintenance window after confirming NVR storage is healthy.
- Re-enabling smart detection notifications where clients had turned them off.
- Checking that exported footage goes through native export so verification works.
- Reviewing any third-party ONVIF cameras to see which can now be fully managed.
Sources
- Welcome to UniFi Protect 7.2 (Ubiquiti blog, July 30, 2026)
- Welcome to UniFi Protect 7.1 (Ubiquiti blog, May 13, 2026)
- UniFi Protect release notes (Ubiquiti Community)
- Evidence verification portal
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