I have noticed reading historical postings on the blog that HomeAssistant keeps removing any apps that don’t use approved API’s from the vendor. It seems that those decisions run completely counter to the whole reason many people are using Home Assistant to begin with. If I want to use Home Assistant because I don’t want my devices and home control in the cloud and refuse to ask permission of someone else’s servers to make changes to devices behind my firewall, then why would I use API’s for a device hooked to Home Assistant that does the same thing? Like a Chamberlain garage door opener for instance. Why is the Chamberlain API and cloud instance required. Why is Home Assistant supporting that rather than fully supporting any efforts to control the garage door opener directly? Third party API’s should be the things that are banned in Home Assistant, not the other way around. Home Assistant, to a large portion of the people using it, is about not falling into that trap.
Interested on these historical discussions and posts, can you please share the link?
Usually such implementations are removed if they no longer work, or are unmaintained by their developer.
Also note that API != cloud.
Most of well-behaved devices use local API.
From a maintenance perspective, “hacks” to bypass the lack of API’s are a nightmare. They can stop working at any time, and the same users complaining it wasn’t there in the first place might be the first ones to complain about it failing, blaming HA.
Chris said it better than I could have.
Example: I have some Broadlink smart plugs. The vendor offered a cloud connection, but some developer kindly created an integration for HA which communicated locally with the devices. It worked great, until Broadlink pushed a firmware upgrade which blocked any kind of local access. There’s nothing any HA developer can do when the device isn’t even accessible. A similar thing happened to TP-Link smart plugs in the UK. Here in the US, TP-Link users are just waiting for the axe to fall on us, next.
The answer is, don’t buy cloud-dependent hardware. Yeah, it’s too late if you already have it installed, but don’t blame HA for that.