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Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice
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this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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homeassistant
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
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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.
Those users don't send usage data back to Haier that they can then sell to other companies
Yes, but without the plug in, they wouldn't buy the product to give the data. It's circulat logic on their part.
I bet they're using data sales to subsidize the cost of the devices.
Subsidize? Oh sweetheart, that's not happening - that's just more profit! Silly goose!
that, and I can imagine they fear a giant wave of support tickets from people using HA and having problems
If they have a good support team they already have a form letter for "you are using this product in an unsupported way" and it takes about 30 seconds to process them.
And let's be honest, someone with the tech knowhow to set up home assistant isn't going to ask Haier for help
Yea I don't really contact a company unless someone on a forum specifically says that's the best way to resolve the issue (ex. Account authentication related bugs). Either that or it's specifically related to my purchase
Pretty sure that's the case for my less tech-savvy friends and family too
The app already exists, so anyone who has it, will keep it.
Anyone in the market to purchase will now avoid. Their suit will cost more sales than the app, which may have actually generated sales by existing.
I literally saw someone in a different thread about this earlier talking about ripping out their Liftmaster garage doors when they pulled a similar move last year.
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.
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.
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.