At the end of the day this is a very reasonable business decision - an incredibly obvious and easy one.
Chamberlain/myQ makes very low cost (likely loss-leader) mass manufactured devices. Like anything else if you can identify 0.2% of your users leading to 50% of an issue you're having the reasonable thing to do (from a business perspective) is to just cut them loose. If this CTO or anyone at Chamberlain were to try to champion support for HA users people with the numbers would look at them like they are crazy. For 0.2% of the user base it barely justifies anything more than a 10 minute conversation with a foregone decision.
I use and love Home Assistant. While it's a "big deal" to techies and power users like us the total installed base (as these numbers show) is infinitesimally small when you zoom out and look at the total "smart home" market. There are 275k active Home Assistant installations[0]. This number is already tiny compared to myQ sales. Then you can check the myQ integration and see that it's only used by 3% of HA installs[1]. Home Assistant is insignificant to Chamberlain and Chamberlain is insignificant to Home Assistant.
For a device that sells for $30 8,250 HA installs is $247,500 of total device lifetime revenue. Chamberlain has $820m of revenue per year. Even if every one of these installs bought four devices that's less than $1m. They. Do. Not. Care.
Again, I don't love this either. It's a jerk move but when viewed through the eyes of a cold and calculating business it makes perfect sense. Frankly I'm surprised this decision didn't come sooner. Especially when you consider all of these awful commercial devices really want you to install their app so they can push who-knows-what and upsell at every possible opportunity. That's an entire revenue stream they will never tap into with users utilizing the API and few businesses can resist gobs of money they see as ripe for the taking. Sad but true and standard for nearly any business. Even more so for a de-facto monopoly like Chamberlain.
HA users and people here are outraged, and that is completely fair but with these numbers Chamberlain isn't even going to remotely feel this.
At the end of the day HA is extremely powerful and the ecosystem and maker-ish community around it is incredibly robust. A device with a contact sensor on door close/open and relay (or something) to toggle the door is trivial. It's what I've been using since before MyQ or anything like it was even on the market.
Just avoid the commercial "IoT/smart home" junk whenever possible.
Chamberlain/myQ makes very low cost (likely loss-leader) mass manufactured devices. Like anything else if you can identify 0.2% of your users leading to 50% of an issue you're having the reasonable thing to do (from a business perspective) is to just cut them loose. If this CTO or anyone at Chamberlain were to try to champion support for HA users people with the numbers would look at them like they are crazy. For 0.2% of the user base it barely justifies anything more than a 10 minute conversation with a foregone decision.
I use and love Home Assistant. While it's a "big deal" to techies and power users like us the total installed base (as these numbers show) is infinitesimally small when you zoom out and look at the total "smart home" market. There are 275k active Home Assistant installations[0]. This number is already tiny compared to myQ sales. Then you can check the myQ integration and see that it's only used by 3% of HA installs[1]. Home Assistant is insignificant to Chamberlain and Chamberlain is insignificant to Home Assistant.
For a device that sells for $30 8,250 HA installs is $247,500 of total device lifetime revenue. Chamberlain has $820m of revenue per year. Even if every one of these installs bought four devices that's less than $1m. They. Do. Not. Care.
Again, I don't love this either. It's a jerk move but when viewed through the eyes of a cold and calculating business it makes perfect sense. Frankly I'm surprised this decision didn't come sooner. Especially when you consider all of these awful commercial devices really want you to install their app so they can push who-knows-what and upsell at every possible opportunity. That's an entire revenue stream they will never tap into with users utilizing the API and few businesses can resist gobs of money they see as ripe for the taking. Sad but true and standard for nearly any business. Even more so for a de-facto monopoly like Chamberlain.
HA users and people here are outraged, and that is completely fair but with these numbers Chamberlain isn't even going to remotely feel this.
At the end of the day HA is extremely powerful and the ecosystem and maker-ish community around it is incredibly robust. A device with a contact sensor on door close/open and relay (or something) to toggle the door is trivial. It's what I've been using since before MyQ or anything like it was even on the market.
Just avoid the commercial "IoT/smart home" junk whenever possible.
[0] - https://analytics.home-assistant.io/
[1] - https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/myq/