I don’t use GPIO. I think the elephant in the room here isn’t the removal of it in so much it is a communication failure.
This isn’t the first time the HA devs have failed hard in this category. They were completely out of touch with Supervised installations and probably more so with ZWave (what colossal train wreck that was for a few days….)
In all three of these cases the reason the situation blew up is complete lack of communication. These are massive decisions that should not be made in the dark corners of a dev forum. These are the types of decisions that should have blog posts to solicit input….kind like the FCC does
You don’t have to listen to the feedback…. It at least you could get out ahead of the train and have a plan. In the case of this GPIO fiasco all it would have taken is having a plan to replace it and linking the plan in the release notes. Instead it’s just dumped on the community with what comes across as a big middle finger. The same issue happened with ZWave
If you want to streamline something, maybe focus on your communication quality and approach….as you grow it is going to become more important to keep things smooth.
(I agree GPIO support should not be core but just a regular integration btw)
Also 0.8% can be a large number of people. If you have a million installed users that is 8000 users….I would expect loud complaining from a group this big. You guys have to start realizing your product is large and that communication is key. I don’t feel like you completely get it. You are close……your release blog posts are really quite good….but these kinds of communications for functionality being removed you should probably pay a lot more attention to the approach.