Just an other example of stupid companies… People always laugh at me when I tell them to choose products carefully instead of trying to control them once bought without care but most of them don’t get it at all
In fact, before buying a new Device I check if there is a HA support/solution.
And it’s not only a 10€ ZigBee Plug. For my new HVAC I did the same. Like a Car or PV + Battery system, thesre are 20-30-50k€ expenses, they only will pay off over a long time…
Hu! Thanks for the heads up! We actually were planning to shortly get a couple of Haier AC Systems installed. The offer is already on the table and we would probably have ordered it soon (talking days/weeks here).
Luckily Haier showed their ugly face just in time and before we invested any money in hardware from them!
Back to the beginning…
Still scratching my head how stupid companies can act in 2024… Our decision to have Haier devices at all on our buy list was because the HA compatibility thanks to @Andre0512 - now that Haier thinks and tries to fight him and the community they ended on our NO-BUY list…
Here is my complete No-Buy list based on the BleepingComputer article: Haier plus “a wide range of products under the brands General Electric Appliances, Hotpoint, Hoover, Fisher & Paykel, and Candy.”
According to the article that I’ve read, Haier claims that they suffer from serious economical (financial) damage…
Unless the plugin does a lot more requests to their servers compared to their own app, this is just plain BS.
If not more strain; it’s just that they want userdata => $$$
And if so; they might loose even more money from declining sales figures!
TBH: I don’t have a clue what the effect is to clone the GH repository but doing nothing will not help at all.
They (Haier) have taken the easiest route by this takedown request.
I guess it becomes harder to request GH to remove that repo, no?
Can you pls explain how to do that?
I was also wondering if forking doesn’t make it easy to remove all of them at once, again: no good knowledge of GH from this side.
Creating more buzz might harm them too!
A good way to do so is post on their social media that this will affect them even more since you are not buying their products anymore (even if that was not the intention)
I forked,
but if Github acts on the takedown request all forks will automatically deleted as well.
if you create a copy, and store it on github(and locally so you can use it).
it’s much harder to track all copies, and some might service and if enough people are doing it, it will almost be impossible the handle the take down.
The next step of haier off course will be, changing the API or add a rate limit and still the integration will be useless. but at least it takes them more effort and more time.
Textbook example of a misleading, inflammatory lede. Reason enough for me to “boycott” the video.
It’s a shame that Haier has taken this action against the developer’s software. It would have been preferable for them to work with the developer to address their concerns.
I suspect they, like Chamberlain, figured that whatever negative press this decision produces is less than the benefit they predict they’ll reap. However, unlike Chamberlain, which has a large share of the garage door opener market with few competitors, consumers have many other choices than Haier products.
Time will tell if their decision proves to be as beneficial as they expected.
Another case of corporate greed from a hardware company wanting to pigeonhole you into their data collecting app so they can sell your information. It blows me away when these companies that sell utility hardware try to fatten their profits with user data - why not just keep making devices without being a douche? The world keeps screaming “more privacy” and greedy corporations keep ignoring them and making it worse every day. I’m not sure who is worse, government or corporations at totally ignoring what people want so they can do what they want instead.
There are some comments on here “this is why I check HA forums first”, and while I totally agree with that, there’s no way to know when an integration is a “hack” versus true integration so you would have seen that Haier could be integrated and then you bought their device. I probably have a few hacked integrations in my setup that work great now but the company could issue a take-down tomorrow, there’s just no way to combat that. And kudos to those that hack it, it’s good until it’s gone.
These companies don’t understand that home automation isn’t just a geeks market any longer, the mainstream has caught on so all these companies are doing are hurting themselves. Haier isn’t the only game in town.
What is more concerning to me is the precedent. If Haier gets greedy and then issues a takedown of open source software then the next company gets ideas (and greedy) and then the next and the next. Apple could have issued takedowns of Homebridge many years ago (and I keep expecting them to) but they understand that while it may tread on their patents and copyrights, it grows people’s interest in their platform so they leave it be (for now). Microsoft did the same, they let people freely pirate their software until they owned 90% of the market (much through piracy) and then they clamped down hard. This is to say there is strategy to allowing people to do this type of stuff, it creates brand loyalty and puts more of their products in peoples hands, who care if HA integrates it via a back door so long as your product is selling?
It might not have been obvious to Haier for now but Andre could actually have boosted sales in the past because of the HA integration he made in his free time!
I guess they quite successfully burned their name for now in the tech/foss community. Only a (quick) 180° turn might alleviate the worst…
Otherwise the question is always (like with Chamberlain) what percentage of users are actually using the products without the sh*tty manufacture apps but rather opt-in for a (much) better integration and experience with HA?
What is interesting is the amount of forks the hon repository has (already) - not sure if the is related to the most recent “developments”?
Essentially Haier said “GO FORK YOURSELVES” and we did, 1,300 times. Truth is that this is a scare tactic more than anything else, they know that TheHolyRoger isn’t making money off this and doesn’t want to go out-of-pocket to fight this and know it’ll get taken down. This is another example of why depending on the cloud for anything you use is a bad idea.
At least anyone who already installed this will continue to work for now but you can just about guarantee that they will change something in the API very soon to make sure it breaks the component.
never seen and will never happen are 2 different things,
but if I read the last paragraph I don’t think it’s unlikely especially since there are over a 100 forks, so they might not even review every last one of them.
