[a254613e]

The main reason why HA accounted for so many requests is probably because it was a polling integration, requesting data every 30 seconds from the server, while the official app either had push events when something changes, or it updated state when the app gets opened.

[giancarlostoro]

Why not... just allow HA receive callback events at that point when things change? I feel like this has an easy resolve that doesn't piss off your power user customers, and makes them encourage others to invest in your products, IE power users, and they'll come back because despite being a little extra engineering effort, they were glad you thought of them.

[jacquesm]

Why not simply allow HA to integrate on site rather than to have to go through some crappy service that likely will not last the lifetime of the doors in the first place?

[twicetwice]

Good suggestion, but where and how does HA receive callbacks? I would guess that almost all HA instances are behind residential LANs and most aren't accessible on the public internet. You could use dynamic DNS and forward ports, but that's flaky, you might run into CGNAT, etc. And anyway, it's best if your HA instance isn't publicly addressable; mine is only accessible over my personal WireGuard VPN and I intend to keep it that way.

I'm sure this is a solvable and solved problem, but I do believe it is non-trivial, and potentially a major headache for a company to implement just to support a tiny niche of users. I'd be delighted to find out I'm wrong though!

And, unfortunately, the business case isn't there, since this weakens lock-in effects. I don't endorse this reason—that's why I run my own HA instance and don't buy or use any products that require the cloud or otherwise can't be operated entirely locally (including flashing Valetudo to my robot vacuum!).

[moritonal]

I recently bought a Nuki smart-lock, purely because it offered MQTT support with auto home-assistant discovery. Vote with your wallets and we can have nice things.

https://support.nuki.io/hc/en-us/articles/12947926779409-MQT...

[bluGill]

Because that would require them to build a callback system for the 0.2%. I don't have this, but I'm guessing the app only checks if your garage is open when you open the app. That is if you don't have the app open and someone opens the door you don't get a notification.

[ryukoposting]

Isn't the high road solution here to open your API to enable users to make a less shitty HA integration?

Either way, they'll almost certainly pull the plug on this service sometime before the end of the decade.

[lhamil64]

Or open up a local API so Home Assistant users don't even need to hit their servers in the first place, which is preferable anyway...

[giancarlostoro]

I would argue that letting HA define a callback URL or some way to receive those events instead of relying on polling would do it. But also, are they caching the responses? I have a weird feeling that the vendor is not caching enough, especially for data that changes insanely infrequently.

[criddell]

That’s definitely the high road solution. The low road solution would have been to start suing HA users under the CFAA. So I guess they took the middle road.

[Angostura]

Possible answers would be for the company to create an official integration, using a change state trigger rather than a polling trigger - or possibly to throttle requests from a particular IP to a certain number per day to incentivise parsimonious usage

[xur17]

Absolutely. It would also be possible for them to create a local API that home assistant can call over the local network. The real problem is that the company just doesn't care.

[greggsy]

HA even claim that it’s used as a test bed for many iot products, so it can often have integrations before any other platform. Kind of makes sense, give many cross platform integrations there are in it.

[lvh]

A third-party hub would have a similar problem, though, right?

[mikeryan]

MyQ has built in integrations for Apple Smart Home and Alexa. I’m assuming in those situations the MyQ app passes state to those services so they don’t have to poll.