Appliances giant Haier reportedly issued a takedown notice to a software developer for creating Home Assistant integration plugins for the company's home appliances and releasing them on GitHub.
“Specifically, the plug-ins are using our services in an unauthorized manner, which is causing significant economic harm to our Company.”
Presumably, they don’t charge customers extra for hOn, so surely the only people using it via HA are the same people that would otherwise have used their (presumably) shitty app that isn’t meeting the customers’ needs in the first place?
Not clear on how this causes them “significant” economic harm. Dick move.
Im expecting that HA provides a better experience because it might be hitting their services more than their own app, and they haven’t costed the resources for hosting their service to include those extra requests coming from HA?
Possibly, but we’re talking about appliances here. I know for a fact that my HVAC controller polls their cloud service just as much as my HA does (using a similarly-developed plugin to what we’re talking about here).
Of course, that could mean it’s doubling the number of times they’re being hit, but I somehow doubt there’s millions of customers doing that - the forks and stars on the repos are only in the hundreds.
I’m guessing it’s what others here have already said - loss of usage data that they’ve been able to sell.
One of the problems with the cloud-polling integrations is that they will frequently poll the back-end APIs to get the current status of that device. A normal user might only open up the app once or twice a day and call the APIs, but these integrations will go 24/7 every 10s-5m. That can add up to a non-trivial amount of traffic. If there’s 100 users opening it up once a day, that’s not a lot of traffic, but 10 users polling every 1 minute is equivalent to 15k people doing something once a day.
I actually saw one of my integrations I used defaulted to updating every 10 seconds. I decreased that because I didn’t want to draw attention to it.
A business will look at their usage and ask why there’s more than expected traffic. They could be running their server on a potato. They could go back and support Matter, that costs money, requires skilled engineers, and cuts into profit margins.
While it sucks, that is something they could point to in a court about “economic harm”.
I reckon it’s probably not that much. There has to be tens of thousands of customers worldwide that are using their shitty app.
Forks and stars on the original repo numbered only in the hundreds.
Cloud services and API gateways usually charge once you get into the millions of requests. Amazon API Gateway doesn’t even charge for having the APIs active - only for the requests that are received and the data transferred out.
I’m finding it very difficult to believe a few hundred HA users even came close to putting a dent in their cloud bill.
Presumably, they don’t charge customers extra for hOn, so surely the only people using it via HA are the same people that would otherwise have used their (presumably) shitty app that isn’t meeting the customers’ needs in the first place?
Not clear on how this causes them “significant” economic harm. Dick move.
By plug-ins, you mean your customers?
Im expecting that HA provides a better experience because it might be hitting their services more than their own app, and they haven’t costed the resources for hosting their service to include those extra requests coming from HA?
Possibly, but we’re talking about appliances here. I know for a fact that my HVAC controller polls their cloud service just as much as my HA does (using a similarly-developed plugin to what we’re talking about here).
Of course, that could mean it’s doubling the number of times they’re being hit, but I somehow doubt there’s millions of customers doing that - the forks and stars on the repos are only in the hundreds.
I’m guessing it’s what others here have already said - loss of usage data that they’ve been able to sell.
One of the problems with the cloud-polling integrations is that they will frequently poll the back-end APIs to get the current status of that device. A normal user might only open up the app once or twice a day and call the APIs, but these integrations will go 24/7 every 10s-5m. That can add up to a non-trivial amount of traffic. If there’s 100 users opening it up once a day, that’s not a lot of traffic, but 10 users polling every 1 minute is equivalent to 15k people doing something once a day.
I actually saw one of my integrations I used defaulted to updating every 10 seconds. I decreased that because I didn’t want to draw attention to it.
A business will look at their usage and ask why there’s more than expected traffic. They could be running their server on a potato. They could go back and support Matter, that costs money, requires skilled engineers, and cuts into profit margins.
While it sucks, that is something they could point to in a court about “economic harm”.
I reckon it’s probably not that much. There has to be tens of thousands of customers worldwide that are using their shitty app.
Forks and stars on the original repo numbered only in the hundreds.
Cloud services and API gateways usually charge once you get into the millions of requests. Amazon API Gateway doesn’t even charge for having the APIs active - only for the requests that are received and the data transferred out.
I’m finding it very difficult to believe a few hundred HA users even came close to putting a dent in their cloud bill.