Chamberlain Blocks Smart Garage Door Opener From Working With Smart Homes
upstart writes:
Chamberlain packed its app with ads while disabling third-party access:
Chamberlain Group-the owner of most of the garage door opener brands like LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin, and Grifco-would like its customers to stop doing smart home things with its "myQ" smart garage door openers. The company recently issued a statement decrying "unauthorized usage" of its smart garage door openers. That's "unauthorized usage" by the people who bought the garage door opener, by the way. Basically, Chamberlain's customers want to trigger the garage door and see its status through third-party smart home apps, and Chamberlain doesn't want that.
Here's the statement:
Chamberlain Group recently made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of our myQ ecosystem through third-party apps.
This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience for our 10 million+ users, as well as our authorized partners who put their trust in us. We understand that this impacts a small percentage of users, but ultimately this will improve the performance and reliability of myQ, benefiting all of our users.
We encourage those who were impacted to check out our authorized partners here: https://www.myq.com/works-with-myq.
We caught wind of this statement through the Home Assistant blog, a popular open source smart home platform. The myQ integration is being stripped from the project because it doesn't work anymore. Allegedly, Chamberlain has been sabotaging Home Assistant support for a while now, with the integration maintainer, Lash-L, telling the Home Assistant blog, "We are playing a game of cat and mouse with MyQ and right now it looks like the cat is winning."
Our immediate question is why would any garage opener company care about customers using its garage door opener. You sell garage door openers-isn't usage the goal? A quick perusal through the app store reviews reveals what's going on. The iOS app is sitting pretty at 4.8 stars, but the Android app has suffered a wave of one-star reviews starting in October.
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