Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes
Chamberlain packed its app with ads while disabling third-party access.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
It took me 2 hours of coding and an hour of wiring up a $10 raspberry pi zero with a $1.00 pair of sensors to reproduce their functionality with my own app. Fun little project and I didn't have to deal with their crappy application.
Any instructions on how to get this setup?
If you are looking for an all in one solution that will work for most setups, the Shelly 1 is a great option. It’s wifi, so no extra hubs needed. Has full local control with a web interface and optional mobile app with (cloud based) control from anywhere. It can switch ac or dc and has a set of dry contacts that you can connect an external switch or sensor to. Another cool feature is a fallback WiFi connection. If it loses connection to your WiFi, it can broadcast its own network for you to connect to. It’s also only around $15-$20. I used one on my driveway gate for a few years and it worked great. The relay would activate the gate opener and I had a cheap reed switch wired into the dry contacts to tell me if the gate was opened or closed.
Your probably better off with a ratgdo for the controler hardware and home assistant if you want an app on your phone.
Here’s where their claim is bullshite.
If it’s a “small percentage” that’s affected, why waste the effort to block it?
They’re planning on charging a monthly fee, and I they’re lying about the small percentage.
I think they want to see how many people will convert to their app.
I thought I read from the article, 0.2% of their users were responsible for 50% of the API calls. Most likely due to how things were integrating or polling?
Or because their app sucks and 99.8% of people set it up and never use it.
If it were a polling issue, they could have worked with 3rd party integrations and asked for mitigations or changes to the services. The changes shouldn’t be that hard, they’re known problems with documented solutions.
This is the same as “network neutrality is bad because a small number of users use a lot”
Hell, they could have set up a “free tier” that had a limited number of requests.
Or the best answer, they could have made an “all local network” api that allowed them to skip out on data costs entirely for people that don’t want to use their app.
Why did they skip out on any of the solutions available that allowed users to continue to integrate?
💰
I’m going through this currently, my Homebridge setup was working great until this bullshit. I’ll never buy one of their shitty products again
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company recently issued a statement decrying "unauthorized usage" of its smart garage door openers.
Chamberlain Group recently made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of our myQ ecosystem through third-party apps.
Other one-star reviews mention things like, "I clicked door open/close event and it popped up the video storage subscription dialog to ask me to subscribe," and, "Most of the app is dedicated to trying to upsell you on services and devices you don't need."
Another part of this is probably the plug at the end of Chamberlain's statement to "check out our authorized partners," which includes companies like Amazon and Alarm.com.
This connects the garage door button wires to your Wi-Fi—something Chamberlain presumably can't break on purpose—and freely communicates with everything.
We'll leave you with some consumer advocacy from Schoutsen and the Home Assistant team: "Once a company decides to be hostile to its customers, the only way we can win is by not playing their game at all.
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