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A comment on Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API. Parent comment

Re:Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door ... by LeifCarrotson on Wednesday November 08, 2023 @02:19PM (#38195503)
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.

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Re:Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door ... by xp84 on Wednesday November 08, 2023 @07:40PM (#38199354)
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.

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