Chamberlain v. Home Assistant

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.