@ZDudu,

There are a few things that can cause this, beyond not being connected to your home's WiFi - and it may just depend on how your router handles device-device communications.

- Your phone and device could be on different bands (2.4 vs 5GHz)

- You could be connecting to a different mesh node, RE, or Access Point as the camera

- You could have a vpn enabled on the camera

- Privacy settings in your phone's network settings may be interfering/preventing the device from communicating directly or being recognized as a local device.

- The device could be on an IoT network or isolated from your other devices - forcing the camera to communciate through the internet

Try taking a look at the above cases, to see if you can narrow down one of these as a culprit.

What type of network are you connecting to? What is the layout?

What Phone are you using the Tapo App on?