And if Chaimberlain charges Amazon $0.50 per door opened to enable that feature (which steers buyers towards Amazon and away from the manufacturer website, Walmart/target/eBay/random competitor that doesn't have that feature) that might be a bigger, recurring, higher-margin revenue stream than all of Chaimberlain's traditional manufacturing profits. Which would you rather have - $200 revenue for a $100 cost once in 20 years, or $0.50 per week for a few packets of data?

They could afford to give away the openers if they could win that revenue stream.

And Amazon would dump them in a second if consumers could instead click "Link your Home Assistant for secure deliveries and get $0.30 digital credit". Or more likely, Amazon would throw directly wired Dash buttons at consumers to enable secure deliveries.

That sounds plausible in theory, but it's still pretty weird to me though because Home Assistant is exclusively the domain of home automation geeks. There isn't even an off-the-shelf turnkey device to get into the ecosystem, you have to know what computers are (including scary things like "operating system" and "IP address") to even get started.

I don't know what Chamberlain has to gain by sticking it to that particular demo. For HA to be a threat to the "partnerships" like Amazon, it would have to have an audience sizeable enough that Amazon would consider incentivizing adoption.

I would say it seems dumb to piss off the most passionate fans of home automation when you're a vendor of equipment that such people might want to buy, but Chamberlain has such a stranglehold on the market that I think they figure that even if they royally piss off that 5% of the garage door opener market, those suckers (or their garage door installers) will be forced to buy the gear from them anyway.