Every no-drill guide on the internet, including ours until now, does the same thing: it explains the adhesive method carefully, then adds a line noting that brick and rough stucco are “not ideal”, and moves on. If your entry happens to be brick, that line is the whole page, and the advice you needed stops exactly where your problem starts.
So let us be direct about it. Adhesive does not work on brick. Not poorly, not with a stronger tape — it does not work. Adhesive bonds by making continuous contact with a smooth surface and flowing into its microscopic texture. Brick is porous, uneven, usually dusty, and often has a loose surface layer of its own. A pad pressed against it touches a fraction of its area, and whatever it does bond to is surface material that is not itself firmly attached to anything. Ring publishes brick, shingles and rough stucco as surfaces that weaken the bond, and that is the manufacturer being polite.
The good news: there is a proper answer, it costs less than the adhesive would have, and it is more reversible than any tape on the market.
Brick clips: the actual solution
Brick clips are sprung steel hooks that grip one brick, top edge and bottom edge, using the small step where the brick face stands proud of the mortar joint. You push one on by hand and the spring holds it there. Nothing is drilled. Nothing is glued. Removal is a hand pull, and the brick is left precisely as you found it.
Weight is not the constraint people expect: the clips we link publish a 25 lb hold, and a video doorbell weighs a few ounces. Two facts decide whether they will work for you, and both take a minute to check before you order.
1. Measure a brick
Clips are made in size ranges — the arms have to span your brick’s height from the mortar line below it to the mortar line above. Measure one on the actual wall. Brick sizes vary by region and by era, and a clip a quarter-inch out of range will not go on at all. This is the whole reason people leave one-star reviews on brick clips, and it is a measuring problem rather than a product problem.
2. Look at your pointing
The clip needs an edge to hook. If the mortar in your wall is raked back or flush enough that the brick face stands slightly proud, you are fine. If the pointing has been overfilled so the mortar sits level with or over the brick face — common on repointed older buildings — there is no step for the arms to grip and clips are not an option. Look at the wall in raking light and you will see it immediately.
Pick a brick at roughly chest height for a doorbell, or higher for a camera, and hold the device there to check the view before you fit anything. The clip is easy to move, but it is still easier not to have to.
What we would not do: mortar hangers
Hangers that hook into a raked mortar joint exist and they do hold. We are deliberately not recommending them for a rental, for one reason that has nothing to do with strength: mortar is much softer than brick, and a hanger loaded against a joint can crumble it. That leaves a small permanent scar in the pointing — exactly the sort of thing a landlord notices and exactly the sort of thing that is awkward to argue about, because unlike an adhesive mark you cannot simply clean it off. A clip that spreads its pressure across a brick face cuts into nothing. Between two methods that both work, take the one that leaves no evidence.
Stucco is two different problems
People use one word for two surfaces, and the answer differs.
Smooth, sealed stucco — the modern flat-finish kind — can sometimes take a good adhesive pad. Test it honestly: run a hand over it, and if it feels like a painted wall rather than like sandpaper, prep it with alcohol and try. Use a product with a published weight rating so you know what margin you have.
Textured or rough-cast stucco is a no on both counts. Adhesive cannot make contact with it, and clips have no edges to grip. This is the one surface in this whole category with no direct answer, and pretending otherwise would be the easy thing to write. What you do instead is stop trying to mount to that wall.
The two workarounds, which are often the better outcome
Relocate to a smooth surface you have overlooked. The brick wall is rarely the only option. Almost every entry has something smooth within a couple of feet: a metal or uPVC door frame edge, the painted door itself, a sidelight, a mailbox post, a column, a light fitting surround. A doorbell eighteen inches from where you first pictured it works identically. On a truly smooth non-porous surface like metal or uPVC, a permanent industrial tape is a legitimate choice in a way it never is on painted drywall — the surface can take the removal. That is the one place we would use it, and we still rate it Limited for renters because removal is genuinely hard.
Use a hole that already exists. If your apartment door has a peephole, this is not a workaround at all — it is the most reversible install available to a renter, full stop. A peephole camera unscrews the original viewer and drops into the same hole, and at move-out you refit the original. No wall involved, brick or otherwise. Put the original peephole in a drawer the day you take it out.
And if the answer is genuinely nothing
Occasionally there is no exterior option: rough stucco everywhere, no peephole, no smooth surface. That is worth naming rather than dancing around, because there is still a good move available, and it is to give up on the exterior entirely. A camera indoors looking out through a window is zero-install, immune to weather, and covers the approach to your door — see cameras pointed out a window. Combined with an adhesive door alarm on the inside of the door, which sticks to a smooth painted surface without any of the problems above, you get most of the benefit with none of the masonry. Our apartment security kit is built around exactly that logic.
One last note on permission. Attaching anything to the exterior masonry of a building is the case where asking your landlord in writing is genuinely worth the email — not because a clip does damage, but because the exterior is the part of the property other people see, and some leases say so specifically. A one-line request describing a clip that leaves no mark is very easy to say yes to.