I’m not sure how the Ecowitt app works as I’ve never used it. I have Ecowitt send everything to HA and access and use in automations directly from there.
The Ecowitt gateways push their data to whatever you configure in the gateway itself. This is currently limited to HTTP endpoints only. You don’t expose any ports on the Ecowitt gateway.
The official integration does not expose a dedicated port but exposes a webhook on your HA port (default is 8123). If you have configured HA to use HTTPS only (secure configuration) Ecowitt will not be able to send data to HA. HA instead requires you to use HTTP for all of HA so Ecowitt can send to webhook. The official integration does not allow you to choose what port for the specific integration.
The HACS integration exposes a port different from your HA port (default is 4199 but it is configurable when you set up the integration). You can then leave HA secured with HTTPS (per the issue linked, I do not consider the NGINX workaround a secure or acceptable alternative) but only expose this one port with a specific purpose on HTTP. Ecowitt then sends to this alternate port on your HA server.
I am not maintaining the fork except for my own personal use. There are many pull requests on the original HACS repo with the fix but nobody is maintaining it so none have been merged. I just incorporated those changes to make adding it to HACS with the fix easy. If another HA update breaks it I can’t guarantee I will be able to fix it in a timely manner or at all.