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Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

home-assistant.io

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Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#281

Post by sarchertech »

vel0city wrote: post #270
sarchertech wrote: post #89

Any IOT device that requires the cloud for functionality is a trap. I bought a Miku baby monitor specifically because of the 2 devices that offered a feature I wanted, Miku had no subscription fees. And they advertised that they never would. It cost $400. Then they went bankrupt and during bankruptcy they sent out a proposal to start charging for previously free features. Then they retracted that proposal. Not sure i…

I had an internet connected baby monitor. In the end we decided to just get a local RF one and it is a far better experience. Pair it once, and it just works. Lower power. Very reliable. Coverage throughout the house without issue. No apps to crash in the background. No dropped streams. No needing to log in to the app. No worries about features getting taken away. No subscriptions. No having to send data out to the c…

My wife works nights and she likes to be able to check in occasionally. It’s also got a millimeter wave radar that shows a breathing graph.

My wife is a pediatric ER doctor and she thinks the breath tracking radar is stupid, but I like to be able to look over and see the graph because I’m a crazy person and otherwise I’d zoom in on the camera and stare at it until I see movement.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#282

Post by cptcobalt »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #234

Partially responsible for this. (Sold Lockitron to Chamberlain in 2017 which became the basis for Amazon Key integrations.) Contrary to the popular sentiment in a lot of the comments here, there’s not much value in the analytics. As we all painfully found out in the 2010’s, there are only two viable recurring revenue streams in the IoT space - charging for video storage and charging for commercial access. Chamberlain…

I know it's a distraction and orthogonal to your point, but your statement of a "key fob for your Tesla for $300" is fallacious and incorrect. Tesla uses Phone Key with with the Tesla app as your primary method of unlocking the car, with a $20 NFC card as fallback, and the limit of paired phones is above any practical real-world use. If you want a keyfob as a status symbol, it's $175. (Mine is a desk ornament, it doesn't get used.)

Swap in a more traditional automaker, and your point remains correct.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#283

Post by kkielhofner »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #7

From company statement: > Our customers rely on us to make access simple without sacrificing quality and reliability. Unauthorized app integrations, stemming from only 0.2% of myQ users, previously accounted for more than half of the traffic to and from the myQ system, and at times constituted a substantial DDOS event that consumed high quantities of resources. Yeah, that sounds plausible, because: - Home Assistant u…

At the end of the day this is a very reasonable business decision - an incredibly obvious and easy one.

Chamberlain/myQ makes very low cost (likely loss-leader) mass manufactured devices. Like anything else if you can identify 0.2% of your users leading to 50% of an issue you're having the reasonable thing to do (from a business perspective) is to just cut them loose. If this CTO or anyone at Chamberlain were to try to champion support for HA users people with the numbers would look at them like they are crazy. For 0.2% of the user base it barely justifies anything more than a 10 minute conversation with a foregone decision.

I use and love Home Assistant. While it's a "big deal" to techies and power users like us the total installed base (as these numbers show) is infinitesimally small when you zoom out and look at the total "smart home" market. There are 275k active Home Assistant installations[0]. This number is already tiny compared to myQ sales. Then you can check the myQ integration and see that it's only used by 3% of HA installs[1]. Home Assistant is insignificant to Chamberlain and Chamberlain is insignificant to Home Assistant.

For a device that sells for $30 8,250 HA installs is $247,500 of total device lifetime revenue. Chamberlain has $820m of revenue per year. Even if every one of these installs bought four devices that's less than $1m. They. Do. Not. Care.

Again, I don't love this either. It's a jerk move but when viewed through the eyes of a cold and calculating business it makes perfect sense. Frankly I'm surprised this decision didn't come sooner. Especially when you consider all of these awful commercial devices really want you to install their app so they can push who-knows-what and upsell at every possible opportunity. That's an entire revenue stream they will never tap into with users utilizing the API and few businesses can resist gobs of money they see as ripe for the taking. Sad but true and standard for nearly any business. Even more so for a de-facto monopoly like Chamberlain.

HA users and people here are outraged, and that is completely fair but with these numbers Chamberlain isn't even going to remotely feel this.

At the end of the day HA is extremely powerful and the ecosystem and maker-ish community around it is incredibly robust. A device with a contact sensor on door close/open and relay (or something) to toggle the door is trivial. It's what I've been using since before MyQ or anything like it was even on the market.

Just avoid the commercial "IoT/smart home" junk whenever possible.

[0] - https://analytics.home-assistant.io/

[1] - https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/myq/

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#284

Post by bluGill »

tech_ken wrote: post #280
paulgerhardt wrote: post #234

Partially responsible for this. (Sold Lockitron to Chamberlain in 2017 which became the basis for Amazon Key integrations.) Contrary to the popular sentiment in a lot of the comments here, there’s not much value in the analytics. As we all painfully found out in the 2010’s, there are only two viable recurring revenue streams in the IoT space - charging for video storage and charging for commercial access. Chamberlain…

So you're saying that retailers will pay Chamberlain to act as more or less a clearinghouse for package deliveries in my garage, and that in order to successfully operate this model Chamberlain needs to funnel all users through their proprietary channels in order to fully vet the delivery transaction? Or at least to prevent HA users from nibbling at Chamberlain's lunch with DIY equivalents? Do you think that they wil…

For retailers I want someone to verify that they are legitimate. I don't want random people in my garage. If someone enters my garage when I'm not home they better really be agents for WalMart/Amazon/target/UPS (as opposed to WolMort/Amozan/targit/USP...) , and whatever company does that does background checks on drivers. Probably they also need to have other cameras in their vehicles so that drivers trying to steal whatever valuables I have are not stolen. (as already pointed out, most people have an unlocked door from the garage to the house)

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#285

Post by justin_oaks »

egberts1 wrote: post #139
lvh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That helps, but a remote integration doesn't _have_ to be hostile. I get that it's different from IoT, and most of my stuff is local Zigbee after learning the hard way, but my Home Assistant also talks to the Norwegian meteorological institute and Tailscale :) One reason this is tricky to do is because up until let's say the last 6 months or so, myQ _wasn't_ hostile, even if it was Cloud-based. (I get that that align…

All remote are more potentially hostile than any local will ever be.

And the company doesn't even have to be actively hostile for remote to be risky.

The company could go out of business and shut down their servers. Or shut down the servers because they're no longer selling the product.

Sometimes incompetence is as bad or worse than malice. The company could break an API accidentally. Or the API only works intermittently. Or they could add poorly-implemented rate limiting that unintentionally affects multiple users when they share an IP via NAT.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#286

Post by thereddaikon »

tzs wrote: post #185
lvh wrote: post #15

Based on my local big box store and garage installer availability, Chamberlain has a de facto monopoly. They also pulled the rug out from under customers: that behavior had been in Home Assistant since 2017, and it's their own recent changes that caused the alleged "DDoS". They say it's to promote official products, but the company previously had a local hub that didn't require their cloud service and discontinued it…

> It's unclear if the CTO just doesn't understand that "DDoS" generally implies malice, or if they're intentionally using that language to blame users for using their product. I've definitely seen "DDoS" used when there was no malice, such as when a developer accidentally releases a client that generates way more traffic than it was supposed to. Probably because we don't seem to have a good term for "event that at th…

A term I hear a lot for non-malicious or non-intentional DDOS is the Hug of death.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#287

Post by fnordpiglet »

dboreham wrote: post #260
traviswingo wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Delivery drivers consistently deliver to my neighbor instead of myself. The last three digits of our addresses are 885 and 855, and they consistently confuse the two. They’re tired, overworked, underpaid, and I honestly don’t blame them. But I wouldn’t trust anyone in my garage/home when I’m not home. Not sure why these companies think that will actually work.

In US homes the garage is often a way to access the house with minimal security between the two.

That’s not true, the garage typically has a full outdoor door with standard security (dead bolts, wired into the security system) the same as any other door as the interface door between the garage and the house. This is a code thing for a variety of reasons but primarily because the outdoor door is weatherized and provides a barrier against CO, but also for the precise reason that the garage door is not considered secure. The protocols for opening the door wirelessly are known insecure and municipalities have required outdoor doors at the interface due to the number of home invasions and burglaries through the garage.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#288

Post by mindslight »

Eisenstein wrote: post #262
traviswingo wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Delivery drivers consistently deliver to my neighbor instead of myself. The last three digits of our addresses are 885 and 855, and they consistently confuse the two. They’re tired, overworked, underpaid, and I honestly don’t blame them. But I wouldn’t trust anyone in my garage/home when I’m not home. Not sure why these companies think that will actually work.

They think it will work because if you refuse to do it they won't refund your stolen package unless you file a police report, and convenience with huge downsides wins with consumers 99% of the time over effort with no downsides. This is just conjecture, btw, I have no authoritative knowledge of their plans to do anything.

As things are, missing packages are not really a police matter for the recipient. Recipients don't actually know that a package was stolen, since it never made it into their possession. Amazon could certainly file police reports, but that requires a higher bar of evidence than throw-and-go delivery service provides, and either way it Doesn't Scale (TM).

I'd guess it's more likely the opposite dynamic, where they'll get a bunch of early adopter types to sign up without thinking through the ramifications. And then after the honeymoon period, Amazon will start demanding those users file police reports for missing packages since from their system it now looks much more airtight that the package must have been stolen from the buyer.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#289

Post by gotbeans »

mikeryan wrote: post #170
TeMPOraL wrote: post #7

From company statement: > Our customers rely on us to make access simple without sacrificing quality and reliability. Unauthorized app integrations, stemming from only 0.2% of myQ users, previously accounted for more than half of the traffic to and from the myQ system, and at times constituted a substantial DDOS event that consumed high quantities of resources. Yeah, that sounds plausible, because: - Home Assistant u…

I have a MyQ door opener (and home assistant) This is bullshit. Their app is bloatware that they use to try to push additional services like Amazon home delivery etc. I mean it’s just a button, that’s all it needs to do. I’m going to replace it with one of the recommended devices. This is such an overt money grab.

This. Chamberlain/homeassistant user here too.

In the past the app has gone the lengths of make us try to use their own assistant (!).

Why the fuck would I ever want to use a voice assistant from my garage door provider? Seems like a desperate attempt to enter a market that doesn't even make sense for them as they currently are.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#290

Post by cyberax »

whoopdedo wrote: post #245
paulgerhardt wrote: post #234

Partially responsible for this. (Sold Lockitron to Chamberlain in 2017 which became the basis for Amazon Key integrations.) Contrary to the popular sentiment in a lot of the comments here, there’s not much value in the analytics. As we all painfully found out in the 2010’s, there are only two viable recurring revenue streams in the IoT space - charging for video storage and charging for commercial access. Chamberlain…

A stressed out underpaid and overworked delivery driver is the last person I want in my garage. Verified deliveries are left at the wrong house, or the driver simply takes it with them after posting the porch picture. And I've seen boxes arrive that were forced open and the contents pulled out. But sure, it's the customers who are untrustworthy not the delivery people.

> A stressed out underpaid and overworked delivery driver is the last person I want in my garage. Verified deliveries are left at the wrong house

It doesn't work like this. Delivery workers use an app that opens the door, so if they are at a wrong location, it will be immediately apparent.

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