Same Token, Different Answer

In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen published their famous paradox: two entangled particles, measured at the same moment, seem to communicate faster than light. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance."

Your debugging session just confirmed something equally puzzling. The token is identical:

eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIs...nFzidhkxDg

Same token. Same API endpoint. Same headers. OAuth flow gets empty arrays. Manual refresh gets devices. The only variable is when.

This isn't spooky—it's eventual consistency. Ring's distributed system hasn't propagated the token-to-devices association to all nodes yet. Your OAuth request hits one edge server; your later refresh hits another. The data exists but isn't everywhere.

Amazon (Ring's parent) pioneered this architecture. Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO, wrote the seminal paper: "Eventually Consistent" (2008). The tradeoff is availability over immediate consistency.

Your 7-second retry window isn't long enough. The token works. The API works. The data just hasn't arrived at the replica you're hitting. You're debugging physics, not code.