How many people would buy flying cameras, aka drones, if they didnt have to fear every twig on every tree in the world? How much more could you do with a drone that doesnt crash into obstacles? These arent just rhetorical questions the $999 Skydio 2 is that drone. Where one wrong move will send most drones to their doom, Skydios self-flying system uses AI to duck under canopies and swoop around branches with finesse all by itself. The results have to be seen to be believed: People whove never flown a drone in their lives can fly this drone. My three-year-old flew this drone. Better yet, it can fly itself, automatically filming your hikes, bike rides, or the kinds of stunts youd normally capture with a GoPro, but from the sky instead.Does that mean you should buy a Skydio 2? Thats a more complicated question because, in some ways, this flying robot camera isnt very smart at all. Itll boil down to just how much you can trust this drone and how much youre willing and able to let a computer take the controls. If youre reading these words, I have a hunch you may be considering the Skydio as your very first drone and you should so Im going to explain things I wouldnt normally explain in a drone review. Namely, drones have always been about trust. You have to trust a $1,000 machine to stay up in the air, respond quickly enough so you can keep it from crashing into things, and automatically return home if or when it loses the signal from your controller. It was a big deal when top drone brands like DJI first mastered those things, but we can generally take them for granted now the latest DJI drones even have obstacle avoidance sensors that keep them from smashing into big objects as well, even if theyre nowhere near as advanced as Skydio.Set your expectations appropriatelyBut trust isnt just about whether youll crash. Depending on where you live, society has laws and stigmas against flying drones over people or private property and youre generally not supposed to fly a drone unless you can see it with your naked eyes at all times. You should know right out of the gate that when I say the Skydio 2 is a drone that flies itself without crashing, Im not talking about flying in darkness, fog, walking down the sidewalk through a crowd of people, or along a busy street. We still cant trust any drone to do those things, and the Skydio handles some of them worse than other drones. Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it contracts that no one actually reads. Its impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But were going to start counting exactly how many times you have to hit agree to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people dont read and definitely cant negotiate.The Skydio 2 app only requires you to agree to four things before you fire up the drone, but theyre extremely pointed:Skydios terms of yse, which include a binding arbitration clause to keep you from suing the companySkydios safety and operating guidelinesYour phones location permission: Your phone GPS allows Skydio 2 to return to you.Your phones microphone permission: Your microphone allows Skydio to record audio during your flight.Its worth expanding upon the safety and operating guidelines more, because they allow the company to deny you coverage under its well repair or replace it for free warranty for circumstances which include:Flying at nightFlying over peopleFlying in rain, fog, or snowFlying in winds over 25 mph Flying in temperatures under 23° F or over 104° F Flying over bodies of water more than 30ft across without GPS lockFlying around thin branches, telephone and power lines, ropes, netting, wires, chain link fencingFlying around windows or mirrorsLanding when directly above obstaclesTrying to intentionally crashIncluding thin branches and chain link fencing is weird, considering Skydio explicitly told us the drone should be able to dodge those. Thats four mandatory agreements in total.But in daylight, in good weather, away from other people, I now trust the Skydio to follow me without crashing at all. I implicitly trust it to flip open its new self-tightening propellers, take off from my hand, and automatically film me walking or scooting around a park dense with foliage. Honestly, I dont even look back anymore to see how its doing I just listen for the buzz of propellers to know its still there. In a wide-open area with few obstacles, I trust the Skydio 2 to let me bike down a trail at full speed, with it chasing me the whole time.Add the optional $149 Skydio Beacon, and I trust that this drone will come find me even if I leave it behind, dodging obstacles along the way.With the optional $149 Skydio Controller, I trust I can easily point the Skydios 4K60 HDR camera wherever Id like in the sky, just like a normal drone, but without the same fear. Time after time, I intentionally flew the Skydio toward the thinnest, trickiest branches I could find but it always stopped short or swooped around. Ive accidentally crashed DJI drones twice under far less demanding conditions.It blows my mind that a drone can do any of these things at all, much less for nearly 20 minutes on a charge in my tests. But you should know that it doesnt do them all at the same time, or even equally well and I think thats down to Skydios dizzying array of control schemes.You can fly the Skydio:With a phone, at very short ranges, either automatically following you around or with slightly laggy virtual joysticks or tapsWith the optional Skydio Beacon, with it following you at a greater distance With the optional Skydio Beacons wand mode, where you point it in the direction youd like it to fly with a wave of your handWith the optional Skydio Beacons steering mode, where you press buttons on the beacon to nudge it left, right, up, down, and forwardWith the optional Skydio Beacon paired to your phone over Wi-Fi, merely to let your phones virtual joysticks and video preview work at longer rangeWith the optional Skydio Controller physically plugged into your phone to give you actual physical joysticks and buttonsYou may have noticed I have now written the word optional seven times. Thats because while the $999 Skydio 2 comes with a single battery, charger, USB-C cable, pair of spare propellers, and a quality custom-fit hardshell case, it does not come with a controller in the box. But I also cant tell you which of Skydios control schemes you should pick because theyre all frustrating in one way or another.With the phone and visual tracking alone, the Skydio just couldnt follow me on a high-speed bike ride, through openings in the brush, or if I walked or biked behind obstacles for more than a couple of seconds. Riding down an occasionally tree-topped trail, the Skydio lost me again and again. With its poor Wi-Fi range, there was no point in using the virtual joysticks to fly it even across a stream to check out something on the other side the image would get choppy, cut out, and the drone would be forced to return. I figured the $149 Skydio Beacon would instantly make things better and in a way, it did. The range issues immediately lessened, with the Skydio 2 able to catch up after Id left it in the dust. But weirdly, the GPS beacon didnt stop me from leaving the Skydio behind to begin with or keep its camera locked onto me... and its always a pain to fire the beacon up. It takes forever to get a proper GPS lock and sync it with the drone, which left me waiting by the side of the trail more than once with a dumb look on my face assuming I didnt also run into errors launching the drone. And my Verge colleague and first-time drone pilot Felicia Shivakumar didnt find the beacon easy to use the way Id hoped: each of its modes only let you have partial control of the drone, theyre each hidden behind multiple button presses, and they all feel a little jerky and imprecise rather than finely tuned.And then theres the $149 Skydio Controller, which feels like a cheap toy. Compared to the amazing build quality of the Skydio 2 itself, whose tasteful black and blue magnesium alloy build looks like no other drone (and whose batteries attach with the incredibly satisfying snap only powerful rare earth magnets can provide), the bulky, plastic-y optional controller screams out I was an afterthought with every fiber of its being. Skydio isnt trying to hide that its a rebadged Parrot Anafi controller, but it feels like a poor pick for these reasons:It wouldnt always connect to our phones, sometimes requiring us to flip the USB cable and / or restart the app.It doesnt securely hold onto phones with cases mine slipped out multiple timesWhile Skydio quotes a range of 3.5km, we still saw unreliable connections within easy line of sightSome buttons on the controller do nothing, while others dont work as expected (you can land, but not take off)One of the joysticks literally broke off in Felicias backpack without it being droppedOn the plus side, it is a real physical controller that does actually work if youve got the patience, and my colleague Vjeran found it okay in terms of simply getting the drone where he needed it to go. Personally, I settled on a combination of beacon + phone for the most flexibility: its the only combination that lets you stuff the controls in your pocket, burn some rubber on the trail without fear, then spot something awesome in this distance like a graffiti-covered duck habitat, and send the drone over for a look with a live preview on my phone screen.Speaking of ducks and graffiti, I love this footage I got with Skydios cable cam feature. It was a breeze to just fly the drone to two different points in the sky and get a smooth sliding shot between them: But the other key thing you need to know about the Skydio 2s controls is that youre never fully in control. The more time I spent with this drone, the more I realized how much it tries to protect itself above all else, with unpredictable, sometimes scary results.If the Skydio 2 thinks it cant get through a gap, it wont even if you could fly a normal drone through it with no problem. If it sees a couple items it needs to dodge on the sidewalk, it might fly out into the middle of the street even if youve told it to stay on the opposite side of you. My tests saw it fly over private property, over people, over cars, and nearly into the path of trains without any way to stop it in time, and I lost count of the times I apologized to people who got buzzed with the wind from my drone passing by. Skydio needs a panic buttonFelicia and I agree that Skydio should have a panic button to instantly get out of trouble, or maybe a way to intelligently avoid people and roads, but I also wish it would simply follow me more closely under the obstacles instead of trying to dodge around. In the meanwhile, you probably shouldnt be flying the Skydio anywhere near people, which really reduces the number of places you can use it.And you will want to be extra careful when landing the Skydio, because it turns off obstacle avoidance when you manually ask the drone to land... which led to my first unit landing on the edge of a roof and falling to its doom. Skydio claims its an intentional design decision, but it doesnt make a lot of sense: this drone seems perfectly capable of autonomously finding its own safe landing zone when running out of battery, so why throw that out during a manual landing?Heres the point in the review you might be rightly wondering: Sean, you dont fly drones for a living; does this make any sense for pros? Hows the image quality? Youll want to watch our video to see for yourself, but let me also temporarily turn this review over to Verge videographer Vjeran Pavic, whos been known to fly an array of aircraft and reviewed the Mavic 2 Pro for us last year.Skydio made some clear choices here, and Ill tell you right now that the Skydio 2 is not for professionals. I dont mean that the image quality is bad; its more that this drone operates more like a flying robot than a flying camera. One such choice is that the Skydio 2 only films in one color mode. Theres nothing like a flat, cine-like mode to open up more flexibility to manipulate colors and exposure in post-processing. Thats going to be totally fine for the majority of users, but not for me personally and my line of work. (Note to self: stop being snobby about color.)That said, the footage you get out of that standard color profile is solid colors pop, white balance is on point, dynamic range is decent and its as sharp as you need it to be, as long as you keep shooting with a very low ISO. Once you start raising the ISO, you will naturally invite more noise, but youll also notice how the footage starts losing that contrast and color. Still, youll be happy with some other options like 120 fps slow motion at 1080p and HDR filming which and I dont say this too often actually looks good despite oversaturated reds and greens. When it comes to photos, Skydio takes 12MP photos in both RAW and JPG, which is a bit low on paper, but the photos I got out of it were acceptable minimal chromatic aberration, sharp edges, and good overall detail. But still, the photo mode feels a bit unfinished and underwhelming. For instance, you cant take bracketed photos in case you want to do exposure blending on your own, and there are no fun photo modes like 360 spherical photos, 180 panoramas, or vertical shots. Sure, you can do that manually, but I wanted more from my flying robot. Hopefully thats something Skydio will address in a software update rather than waiting on a new product.Another choice: how this drone flies. Theres no way to turn off obstacle avoidance, meaning it might start making choices you dont always agree with. Will it go under an obstacle, above, or around it? Or will it come to a complete stop? Theres no way to tell and that unpredictability could be frustrating. But its definitely less frustrating than crashing your drone. P.S. Dont fly in the fog.Lastly, video transmission connectivity seems to be worse than other drones. Regardless of which controller I used, it always felt like I started losing signal at about 400 feet and I think Im being generous with that estimate. Even when connectivity was strong, the video feed felt like it was about half a second behind the drone. Thats not uncommon with drones that rely on Wi-Fi, but Id expect better from a dedicated controller.Im going to end on an optimistic note, but I should say something bittersweet first. When we first tried the Skydio 2 in October, it seemed like it could be the drone for absolutely everyone but its not quite there. The Skydio 2 isnt for pros. Its not for absolute beginners who dont know where they should and shouldnt fly a drone safely (though hopefully our warnings will help). Yes, its capable of filming some amazing things autonomously but I cant imagine implicitly trusting it to nail extreme sports shots given how often it hesitates to put itself in danger, and how long it can sometimes take to get into the air. Its not the drone for me, because I try to avoid unfinished products and the Skydio 2 feels that way, with an array of bugs, glitches, and the kind of temporarily awkward design decisions that get ironed out in future revisions.But for some, theres nothing else that can do what the Skydio can today. It might be perfect for the would-be drone hobbyist who wouldnt risk $1,000 on their ability to master a pair of joysticks, or the amateur who needs a tracking shot of a moving person or vehicle, or the influencer who wants a flying camera to follow their exploits (itll even record audio from your phone while flying).And to think that a tiny startup like Skydio produced a sleek, high-quality drone thats within spitting distance of DJI in so many ways and far more advanced in one... its hugely impressive.If I could go back in time and tell myself not to buy my DJI Mavic Pro, I would. Most of the time, it sits in a closet gathering dust. As a parent, I know Id use the Skydio 2 far more often, even if it doesnt fold down as small. But I have a funny feeling Id say something similar about the Skydio 2 next year, should a Skydio 2 Pro or Skydio 3 show up. Thats what Im waiting for. Its not like I could buy a Skydio today, anyhow. The company says its sold out until the middle of next year, when its tiny Redwood City assembly line can catch up with the demand of early adopters who bought it, sight unseen. Thats plenty of time for Skydio to build a pro controller, fix the glitches, and make it a tad smarter.Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see our ethics policy.