Chamberlain v. Home Assistant

It doesn't even matter if you choose the premium product without the forced cloud tie and obvious subscription bait and switch. Because now these companies can change the rules on you after you bought it and you have basically no recourse.

Mobile platforms and stores make it very hard to keep the old version of the control app. It'll be incompatible with a new OS release in no time. And it'll have a phone home to check for updates that killswitches the app anyway. This makes it hard to just refuse to update anything and keep using the last version that worked.

If that phrase is intended to mean that cheaper products surveil you harder, times have changed.

There is even one premium product line which blazed the trail: Apple with its iTunes "ecosystem": they even sport the humour to sell it as "privacy enhancing" -- I always liken it to the farmer protecting their cows from parasites, which of course are always the others.

There's another premium: Tesla. They milk every sliver of data they can from you. Valuable data to train autonomous car algos.

I'm sure we can find more if we look.

So it literally is a case of "even though you're paying for the product, you're still the product" as one of the other comments alluded to.

I was about to ask if they were running this thing on a 386 with a dial-up line...

> It has also been noted that Chamberlain's Android app has ads, and pushes their video storage subscription service. (Some of their garage door openers have built-in cameras, so you can remotely open your garage for a delivery driver and watch to make sure they're not stealing from you).

That explains why it's possible for API users to take up significant resources on their side. But I'd still argue they're incompetent (or, more likely, deliberately controlling and greedy). P2P streaming has been a solved problem for ages, and at least since WebRTC has become commonplace, it's something that lots of normal everyday home users do (without the - undeserved - stigma of BitTorrent etc). So ISPs can't just block it or they'll be flooded with complaints from a lot more customers than those with these garage openers. And even if they still supported a proxy mode as a fallback, for most users WebRTC would probably simply work, reducing the load on their system.

> So Chamberlain is making money from both first-party and official third-party apps, but not from Home Assistant (beyond the initial purchase of the product), so they probably see HA users as less valuable than regular users and not worth the hassle.

So this is the real reason. For them, the thing that's not working right is not their API. In their eyes, what's not working as designed with these customers is their business model.

All in all, more than enough reasons to stay well away from this company. Shenanigans like this are one of the reasons I'm suspicious of 3rd party mediated remote access services, and I completely refuse to use any such things that would cause anything more than a minor inconvenience if they stopped working.

They almost certainly had a physical switch - at least it's hard to imagine another scenario. When they failed, they deliberately failed safe, becoming non-smart devices, which were therefore on. People often get very upset about smart devices whose fail-safe behaviour is to act as close as possible to the non-smart version of that device, but IMO this is categorically correct, and any other choice has some indefensible failure modes.

The real problem here is simply that lack of internet access became a failure state at all, which is completely outrageous. That said, we probably don't know the whole story here and there could have been a power failure involved or some other situation where the designers decided that the best response would be to trigger the fail-safe behaviour.