Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice
Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice
64 comments
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Amazing. Let's truly take it from their point of view.
The only people who care about this plugin are HomeAssistant users, so a very small subset. Those users then either
A) Already own the product, and thus are not going to cost them anything because they already bought it or B) Home Assistant users who are in the market for their product, and from experience will only buy a product if there's an HA plugin.
In what way are they losing "millions" to these 2 groups again?
I have literally made decisions on purchases like vehicles on if they have a home assistant plugin or not. For HomeAssitant users it's one of the largest factors.
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Those users don't send usage data back to Haier that they can then sell to other companies
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It depends. My HVAC controller is a similar story to this one, and a dev has put together a plugin for HA that achieves the same thing. But it makes the exact same calls to the cloud service the OEM uses, so I'm certain they're getting the same usage data from me, regardless of the software means I use to make those calls.
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I'm in nearly B as I usually only buy things with proper protocols, e.g Zigbee, that might not need a dedicated plugin. So obviously Haier is now a company I won't buy anything from and will actively not recommend to anything who cares about my opinion on IoT.
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It is insanely petty. Perhaps they don't want people reverse engineering their APIs, but all their competitors and threat actors likely do it, just not on a public repo.
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Oh no. At least there's no way for everyone in the world to make a backup before it goes dark...
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Right… they claim hosting it is a violation of their TOS, but I’m not one of their customers. How can I violate their TOS if I don’t even use their product.
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It would be a shame if 697 people and counting were to fork the project, it would be a real pain to serve each one of them with takedown notices.
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TIL General Electric Appliances, Hoover, Fisher & Paykel, Aqua, Hotpoint, Leader, and Candy are all owned by the same company.
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Sad, isn’t it? For fun, look up Whirlpool, Albertsons, and Kroger on Wikipedia to see all the brands they own. No wonder prices are high when so much competition has been eliminated.
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Special shout-out to LiftMaster/Chamberlain who did the same rug-pull on their customers last year.
Never trust free cloud services attached to a paid product.
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I was happy to see earlier, the developer commented the following:
Luckily I'm insured. I've contacted my legal expenses insurance and they're covering a lawyer for the case. I will seek advice and see how an expert assesses the situation and then proceed.
Tldr, They are going to fight this!
Source: https://github.com/Andre0512/hon/issues/147#issuecomment-1892738060
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Their follow-up:
I have written to Haier to try to get some clarification and perhaps an agreement. I hope Haier will listen to us now that so many people are supporting us. Thank you all!
Dear Haier team,
you have probably noticed that my announcement to delete the plugin has met with a lot of displeasure from the community. There are a number of people who bought your appliances not only because of the good price/performance ratio, but also because they can be integrated into home assistant.
I think it would be helpful to the discussion if you could explain the following questions:
Please provide details of WHICH clauses of terms of service does this project violate? What is an unauthorized manner? What significant economic harm is being faced by the company? (in terms of dollar figures) When did these projects violate your intellectual property?I'm sorry if some people have gone over the top, but this doesn't have to escalate and there doesn't have to be a bad reputation for your brand in the open source community.
Can we find a common solution here? Can I do something to make the plugins use the API more economically? Should we reduce the polling? I would like to release a new version that uses the API in a way that does not harm your business. You can also consider an official home assistant integration, the home assistant guys would like to get in touch with you for that. This would be a great competitive advantage within the smart home community.
I hope to get an answer and until then I'll leave the repos online.
Andre
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Dude has a good heart, that's for sure. I hope Haier sees the light.
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I love his reply, but i'm afraid history so far has shown that supporting open platforms is not a competitive advantage. The number of hackers like us in the smart home market is negligable. Proper closed platforms rake in the big money, and the public loves it.... Add on some cloud integration & a subscription to functionalities that would take a home assistant user not much time to set up, and you've got something the average customer seems to want...
Still a shit (and probably without any real legal basis) attempt by Haier, but if they're actually aiming at a walled smart home system, from an economical perspective they're probably right... And i hate that they're right....
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You know what that means, soldiers. Clone, clone, clone the repo, far and wide, online and offline. Fuck 'em. Give them the PirateBay whackamole treatment.
For your convenience, from the article:
https://github.com/Andre0512/pyhOn
https://github.com/Andre0512/hon
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Not that it likely matters much but I sent them an email saying I would never purchase one of their products based on this anti-consumerism.
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I’m lazy, can you share your email so I can send a copy?
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"Specifically, the plug-ins are using our services in an unauthorized manner, which is causing significant economic harm to our Company."
Presumably, they don't charge customers extra for hOn, so surely the only people using it via HA are the same people that would otherwise have used their (presumably) shitty app that isn't meeting the customers' needs in the first place?
Not clear on how this causes them "significant" economic harm. Dick move.
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Loss of 3rd party data sales from the tracking embedded in their apps would be my guess.
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Yeah - in an ideal world, the dev would have the means (and legal standing) to challenge this, just to force the fuckers to admit it in court.
Not that it isn't written into their ToS somewhere - just would love them to admit exactly how that harms them so much, financially speaking. Shine a light on the whole thing.
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The only way I see a company like this having "significant economic harm" from you not using their free app is if 1) they eventually plan to charge a fee to use the app or 2) they profit from data their app collects about you (third party data sales, for example).
Not something I'm interested in either way, so they've lost a potential customer.
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Same.
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Looking at the brands they already own, it's not hard to picture a future where they'll own a brand I want to buy.
Although, I'm really interested (and haven't done reading up on hOn yet) - just what level of automation are people looking for on their appliances? I used smart plugs with current measurements, so I can easily get HA to just tell me when my washing machine or dishwasher are finished.
What else are people doing with hOn in HA?
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Im expecting that HA provides a better experience because it might be hitting their services more than their own app, and they haven't costed the resources for hosting their service to include those extra requests coming from HA?
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Possibly, but we're talking about appliances here. I know for a fact that my HVAC controller polls their cloud service just as much as my HA does (using a similarly-developed plugin to what we're talking about here).
Of course, that could mean it's doubling the number of times they're being hit, but I somehow doubt there's millions of customers doing that - the forks and stars on the repos are only in the hundreds.
I'm guessing it's what others here have already said - loss of usage data that they've been able to sell.
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One of the problems with the cloud-polling integrations is that they will frequently poll the back-end APIs to get the current status of that device. A normal user might only open up the app once or twice a day and call the APIs, but these integrations will go 24/7 every 10s-5m. That can add up to a non-trivial amount of traffic. If there's 100 users opening it up once a day, that's not a lot of traffic, but 10 users polling every 1 minute is equivalent to 15k people doing something once a day.
I actually saw one of my integrations I used defaulted to updating every 10 seconds. I decreased that because I didn't want to draw attention to it.
A business will look at their usage and ask why there's more than expected traffic. They could be running their server on a potato. They could go back and support Matter, that costs money, requires skilled engineers, and cuts into profit margins.
While it sucks, that is something they could point to in a court about "economic harm".
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I reckon it's probably not that much. There has to be tens of thousands of customers worldwide that are using their shitty app.
Forks and stars on the original repo numbered only in the hundreds.
Cloud services and API gateways usually charge once you get into the millions of requests. Amazon API Gateway doesn't even charge for having the APIs active - only for the requests that are received and the data transferred out.
I'm finding it very difficult to believe a few hundred HA users even came close to putting a dent in their cloud bill.
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Based on the verbiage of the threat from haier it kinda sounds like they don’t have a leg to stand on. Short of just the financial cost of fighting this blatantly bullshit lawsuit should they file one. The TOS isn’t the law, so to demand the devs to cease all illegal activities means nothing here.
Or am I misunderstanding something?
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You are right, TOS isn't the law. However businesses will try to trick you with this technique, especially if they don't think you have any legal support. You can't commit a crime just because the victim agreed to it, no amount of contracts negate this. Employers often pull this trick to force employees to accept illegal practices.
The person hosting and publishing the code may have never agreed to the TOS. So can't be bound by it. They also can revoke their agreement, and no longer have to comply with it. However, continued use of the businesses web services likely requires agreeing to the TOS and this plug in may be using the businesses web services to make the plugin work.
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There's clearly a lot of negative towards the company, which I agree with, but I'm not reading enough positive support for the dev...
It must be a bit daunting being on the frontline going through this
I'd guess that anyone using the plugin could help them feel supported in these situations by contributing on their "Buy me a coffee" link...
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Genuine link as verified from https://github.com/Andre0512/hon#support
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Some enterprising engineer should start selling replacement control boards for these units. Like, drop-in, solder-on clones with 100% open source control firmware, linked with an ESP32. Zigbee/Zwave/Wifi+MQTT. I don’t mind, I’ll buy their unit and throw out their shitty controller. They’re not gonna DRM the compressor, are they?
Hell, if someone does that I’d consider opening a shop where I flip “refurbished” units with the open source board in em.
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They're not gonna DRM the compressor, are they?
Please don't give them ideas.
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It's what was done for Panasonic ACs: https://www.espthings.io/index.php/2023/09/02/esphome-panasonic-climate-interface/
I'm sure somebody will take a really close look at Haier ACs now.
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There is no market for doing this at all, why would any company worth their salt do it?
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Well, they just lost some customers..
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An F&P induction range was on our short list for an upcoming replacement to our aging gas range. It is now off the short list. Not sure how many API calls a $8000 range would have paid for, but I'm sure they'll be happy to know my HA server won't be pinging them any time soon.
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I just used their Feedback form to tell them what a shitty practice that is and that I will never use their products again.
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When will companies learn that you don't fuck with developers.
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When it actually backfires. Right now, no company was actually hurt by doing stuff like this - quite the opposite, they get a boost since they close down their ecosystem further forcing people to buy their stuff.
There will be "boycotts" but in reality it will blow over in two to four weeks, with people forgetting "an outrage" that didn't reach 99% of their target users at all.
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Never considered buying Haier anyway, but i am looking specifically for appliances that have HAOS support. So them pulling this shit will put them on my black list for ever. I get why Mazda did it, but the car doesn’t need the app to be useful, i can just ignore that part. But this is an home appliance that looses a big part of it’s usefulness…
64 comments