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It's a bit disappointing to see Haier's very reasonable response (an extra high AWS load is expensive, because AWS is just expensive by design) but only after i

It's a bit disappointing to see Haier's very reasonable response (an extra high AWS load is expensive, because AWS is just expensive by design) but only after internet wide outrage. Had Haier reached out and asked the dev to optimise their HTTP calls, or perhaps adviced him on what kind of call pattern their cloud servers were optimised for so that costs could be kept low, Haier wouldn't have received all this bad press. Like many reverse engineered APIs, the HACS plugin probably does a whole bunch of inefficient API calls because there's no way of knowing what API calls are cheap and what calls are expensive. Haier could've gone further, and set up a dialogue to include a Haier component into Home Assistant directly, and slap a "works with home assistant" logo on their products' website. I'm no market analyst, but I'd be surprised if Haier wouldn't turn a profit on implementing official Home Assistant support.

toyg 3y ago
European management culture is very business-first. Chances are that things went more or less like this: - Management sees cost spike, asks Sysadmins - Sysadmins investigate and say "not our fault, it's them pesky commie devs" - Management rings up legal, shenanigans ensue Now they've been publicly bitch-slapped, it's likely that management will do a bit of a sing and dance and then let engineers talk to engineers, while they piss off to some expensive restaurant at the company's expense.
MilaM 3y ago
> It's a bit disappointing to see Haier's very reasonable response (an extra high AWS load is expensive, because AWS is just expensive by design) but only after internet wide outrage. If this is the real reason, how long can you expect Haier to support the API free of charge for existing customers? Not very long I bet. The only sane solution are applicances that can be controled locally without an internet connection.
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  It would be great if "smart" devices requiring access to Internet-based servers had a monthly subscription fee. That would serve to both insure that the servers remained up by making them economically viable for the vendor and preserve the utility of the devices, and drive manufacturers to make locally-controllable devices to appeal to price-sensitive consumers. It would be great if we could go further and demand that manufacturers release the specs for their communications protocols if they exceed a threshold of unit sales, since they're effectively making a bunch of devices landfill fodder when they turn off the servers within the viable lifetime of the dependent devices. There's cool stuff out there I'd love to buy but once I see it requires an Internet connection it's a no-sale for me. (Even being locally controllable isn't a win if that comes with the requirement of running a closed source native "app". I'm still sad about some 32-bit iOS apps that Apple says I can't run on newer devices. I don't want to keep nursing an iPhone 3 along to be able to control a home appliance because the manufacturer figured out they can tie their product lifecycle to Apple's user-hostile backwards compatibility policies.) Sometime in the last 20 years the tech industry became a game of tempting me with cool features and then snatching them away, versus the exciting progress I remember from the 80s and 90s. I'm sure getting older is part of it, but I can't imagine shaping my habits around technology that can be taken away from me at any time would appeal to me at a younger age either.
  - gh02t 3y ago
    > It would be great if "smart" devices requiring access to Internet-based servers had a monthly subscription fee. Or just support a local API with a published spec. Matter is supposed to be that standard, but adoption is going slowly. Pretty sure zero people using the original reverse engineered cloud API for the Haier stuff in HA want to be using it in preference to a local API.
    - rokkitmensch 3y ago
      I suspect manufacturers see this particular standard as unlocking a race to the bottom in hardware prices and so are unwilling to bite.
      - int_19h 3y ago
        But they are rolling out support. Philips is one prominent example.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Those free cloud services are indeed predatory competition. They are both bundling and dumping.
  - msla 3y ago
    > That would serve to both insure that the servers remained up by making them economically viable for the vendor and preserve the utility of the devices This seems naïve: "Yes, it's making money, but it isn't making enough money" is the phrase on the tombstone of a lot of goods, services, and come down to it, countries through history. Being a customer is no guarantee you get to keep being a customer. > and drive manufacturers to make locally-controllable devices to appeal to price-sensitive consumers. "Special Deal: Comes With Free Six-Month Subscription With Purchase!" because six months is how long they intend to support the device, after which they turn off the service and brick all of them, and of course you can't opt out of the special deal because they don't get any of your data from a device that isn't slaved to their servers.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  > The only sane solution are applicances that can be controled locally without an internet connection. Agreed. I wish companies would take the work already done for them with Matter and just integrate, but if they can't, the least they could do is support the things customers to do the things they want to do.
supergeek133 3y ago
That's what I don't get, why they didn't just start with pure math/data when reaching out to the developer. The only thing I can think of is someone outside of the "knowledge chain" caught wind of it and just fired of the legal threat. For instance, if I told some people inside my company how much traffic HA uses in terms of how many users are on it they'd probably freak out like this too. But their reason (cost and traffic) is the biggest reason we don't like it either.
- rekoil 3y ago
  > But their reason (cost and traffic) is the biggest reason we don't like it either. So stop building cloud-only device interaction then... Home Assistant users will take a LAN API over a cloud API any day. A LAN API should satisfy everyone really, no unnecessarily large bills for the manufacturer, and Home Assistant users can get better/faster integrations with shorter update intervals.
  - randomfrogs 3y ago
    But if it's a LAN API, how exactly will the manufacturer harvest your usage information to sell to third parties? How will they get that sweet, sweet, post-sale monetization?
    - supergeek133 3y ago
      Or the fact that many of the major "security bad press" or "S in IoT stands for security" stories are because such interfaces were made but not properly secured. (see bosch story)
      - rekoil 3y ago
        Authentication is something that does need to be solved, that's true, but the device is authenticating to the cloud already, I can promise you any bad implementations that would have happened in a local API is currently in the authentication against the cloud-based management solution instead, it's just less obvious. Security by obscurity is another phrase for it.
rekoil 3y ago
> Had Haier reached out and asked the dev to optimise their HTTP calls, or perhaps adviced him on what kind of call pattern their cloud servers were optimised for so that costs could be kept low, Haier wouldn't have received all this bad press. Or, god forbid, contributed to the open source code repository in a way beneficial to all.

toyg 3y ago

European management culture is very business-first. Chances are that things went more or less like this: - Management sees cost spike, asks Sysadmins - Sysadmins investigate and say "not our fault, it's them pesky commie devs" - Management rings up legal, shenanigans ensue Now they've been publicly bitch-slapped, it's likely that management will do a bit of a sing and dance and then let engineers talk to engineers, while they piss off to some expensive restaurant at the company's expense.

MilaM 3y ago

> It's a bit disappointing to see Haier's very reasonable response (an extra high AWS load is expensive, because AWS is just expensive by design) but only after internet wide outrage. If this is the real reason, how long can you expect Haier to support the API free of charge for existing customers? Not very long I bet. The only sane solution are applicances that can be controled locally without an internet connection.

EvanAnderson 3y ago
It would be great if "smart" devices requiring access to Internet-based servers had a monthly subscription fee. That would serve to both insure that the servers remained up by making them economically viable for the vendor and preserve the utility of the devices, and drive manufacturers to make locally-controllable devices to appeal to price-sensitive consumers. It would be great if we could go further and demand that manufacturers release the specs for their communications protocols if they exceed a threshold of unit sales, since they're effectively making a bunch of devices landfill fodder when they turn off the servers within the viable lifetime of the dependent devices. There's cool stuff out there I'd love to buy but once I see it requires an Internet connection it's a no-sale for me. (Even being locally controllable isn't a win if that comes with the requirement of running a closed source native "app". I'm still sad about some 32-bit iOS apps that Apple says I can't run on newer devices. I don't want to keep nursing an iPhone 3 along to be able to control a home appliance because the manufacturer figured out they can tie their product lifecycle to Apple's user-hostile backwards compatibility policies.) Sometime in the last 20 years the tech industry became a game of tempting me with cool features and then snatching them away, versus the exciting progress I remember from the 80s and 90s. I'm sure getting older is part of it, but I can't imagine shaping my habits around technology that can be taken away from me at any time would appeal to me at a younger age either.
- gh02t 3y ago
  > It would be great if "smart" devices requiring access to Internet-based servers had a monthly subscription fee. Or just support a local API with a published spec. Matter is supposed to be that standard, but adoption is going slowly. Pretty sure zero people using the original reverse engineered cloud API for the Haier stuff in HA want to be using it in preference to a local API.
  - rokkitmensch 3y ago
    I suspect manufacturers see this particular standard as unlocking a race to the bottom in hardware prices and so are unwilling to bite.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      But they are rolling out support. Philips is one prominent example.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Those free cloud services are indeed predatory competition. They are both bundling and dumping.
- msla 3y ago
  > That would serve to both insure that the servers remained up by making them economically viable for the vendor and preserve the utility of the devices This seems naïve: "Yes, it's making money, but it isn't making enough money" is the phrase on the tombstone of a lot of goods, services, and come down to it, countries through history. Being a customer is no guarantee you get to keep being a customer. > and drive manufacturers to make locally-controllable devices to appeal to price-sensitive consumers. "Special Deal: Comes With Free Six-Month Subscription With Purchase!" because six months is how long they intend to support the device, after which they turn off the service and brick all of them, and of course you can't opt out of the special deal because they don't get any of your data from a device that isn't slaved to their servers.
jeroenhd 3y ago
> The only sane solution are applicances that can be controled locally without an internet connection. Agreed. I wish companies would take the work already done for them with Matter and just integrate, but if they can't, the least they could do is support the things customers to do the things they want to do.

supergeek133 3y ago

That's what I don't get, why they didn't just start with pure math/data when reaching out to the developer. The only thing I can think of is someone outside of the "knowledge chain" caught wind of it and just fired of the legal threat. For instance, if I told some people inside my company how much traffic HA uses in terms of how many users are on it they'd probably freak out like this too. But their reason (cost and traffic) is the biggest reason we don't like it either.

rekoil 3y ago
> But their reason (cost and traffic) is the biggest reason we don't like it either. So stop building cloud-only device interaction then... Home Assistant users will take a LAN API over a cloud API any day. A LAN API should satisfy everyone really, no unnecessarily large bills for the manufacturer, and Home Assistant users can get better/faster integrations with shorter update intervals.
- randomfrogs 3y ago
  But if it's a LAN API, how exactly will the manufacturer harvest your usage information to sell to third parties? How will they get that sweet, sweet, post-sale monetization?
  - supergeek133 3y ago
    Or the fact that many of the major "security bad press" or "S in IoT stands for security" stories are because such interfaces were made but not properly secured. (see bosch story)
    - rekoil 3y ago
      Authentication is something that does need to be solved, that's true, but the device is authenticating to the cloud already, I can promise you any bad implementations that would have happened in a local API is currently in the authentication against the cloud-based management solution instead, it's just less obvious. Security by obscurity is another phrase for it.

rekoil 3y ago

> Had Haier reached out and asked the dev to optimise their HTTP calls, or perhaps adviced him on what kind of call pattern their cloud servers were optimised for so that costs could be kept low, Haier wouldn't have received all this bad press. Or, god forbid, contributed to the open source code repository in a way beneficial to all.