Never trust cloud solutions when it isn’t your cloud.
It’s just someone else’s computer.
Here is Home Assistant’s Blog Post on the subject.
This is why I hate depending on cloud services for my home automation. The last one on my shitlist is my thermostat. Just haven’t gotten around to researching options yet.
Well, I swapped over to ratgdo instead of API access a couple months back, seems I pulled that trigger at the perfect time.
Fuck them though. It costs them the same whether you’re using the mobile app, or direct API calls, in fact it likely costs less. They are literally just after money.
As someone who maintained an API, 80% to 90% of my time was discovering that hackers were attempting an exploit, blocking it, adding monitoring, building abuse prevention. After we shut our API off, we could turn services back on, especially free services that we only took away because hackers.
Not to mention the support volume. More than half of our support calls were, “Why did you suspend my account? I’m a poor old grandpa. I want to appeal.” Okay, yep we looked into activity and you sent 50000 requests in less than a minute and that’s all you ever did with this account. Did you know hackers lie and will spend hours getting tech support? You go to school to be an engineer to build cool stuff and instead field bullshit support requests all day from people trying to destroy the thing you want to build so they can maybe make thirty bucks and cost you tens of thousands. It sucked the life out of me and turned me eternally cynical.
Anyone have good suggestions on what deserves my money, or the effort of setting up?
Anything new I buy has the ability to directly talk to homeassistant without a third party. Zigbee, zwave, ip. If its cloud it can fuck right off, I don’t need it.
Many brand names are using these protocols to talk to their bullshit hubs that then send your data out of your network. I’ve got a hodgepodge of stuff like samsung sensors, Ikea switches, ip cameras and all kinds of stuff.
It isn’t even that hard to set them up. HA can detect most devices on the network and recognise them.
Why does one need to connect everything like this? The only connected system (besides computers/entertainment ) I have in my entire house is a security system. What benefit is there to all that other stuff? Doesn’t it add quite a bit of cost?
Most security systems these days are just whitelabeled zwave etc sensors with a proprietary hub and a monthly charge.
The nice thing about HA is that you can pull almost everything into it and then add whatever automations you want. Recent example was my SO complaining about how dark it was going to the car when they leave in the morning. Super easy to set up an automation that turns on the floodlight switches when the front door opens between dusk and dawn. All kinds of stuff like that that’s really useful.
This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience
The best possibile experience is having a single app that can do the whole house, not a broken proprietary app that occupies 200 mb of space on the phone and that takes 5 seconds to start because of its fancy splash screen
Don’t understand this, they are actively kicking out customers
The myQ app sucks so much, it doesn’t even have Siri integration or widgets. Plus it’s riddled with ads for their $100 camera.ARE YOU KIDDING ME‽ I’m 1 starting this actively (meaning at every update I renew my review)
They’re not talking about your experience. They’re talking about the experience at the CEO’s summer house… That tennis court will not build itself and not for free 😁
Ah yes best possibile experience is this: (from the ars Technica article about it)
“Sadly, this app now displays advertisement at the very top and I cannot find a way to disable it,” writes one Play Store reviewer (Google doesn’t provide links to reviews). “This is very disturbing and on top of it, it moves my garage opening button out of the visible part of the screen. So to use it I now have to first look at the ads, then scroll down and hope to find my button.”
This is what it looks like now. The ad always occupies that space at the top
Ahhh, subscription for being integrated in a car. While instead with home assistant you could just say hey [assistant] open the door
Too bad they have a monopoly in the NA market
