Chamberlain Group intentionally breaks third-party API access to MyQ, destroying home automation solutions

[BorkBorkBork]

Recently, Chamberlain Group (the makers of like 60%+ of the North American garage door market) killed off third-party access to their MyQ API.

 

Popular home automation setups like HomeAssistant, HomeBridge, and HOOBS all relied on API access to for access to users' garage doors. 

Unless users happen to own a partnered car (Tesla, some Hondas, BMWs, etc) the ad-laden myQ app is now the only way to access any sort of smart functionality for MyQ garage door owners.

 

They have also killed off access to Alexa, Google Home and HomeKit integrations (the latter of which never formally existed at all except through third-party solutions). 

[PDifolco]

Huh another band of idiots that want to kill their business and make people wary of "smart house" stuff

Not bad, I'd keep my stupid plain metal garage door some more then  

 

[madsci1016]

 

Popular (own 70-80% of all garage door openers) brand Chamberlin has taken action to prevent non-paying apps from using their API to control customer's doors. Most affected is every user of Home Assistant who owned and integrated such a garage door into their smart home interface. Chamberlin has issued a statement claiming the move is about " performance and reliability"  and only affects a small percentage of users. Home Assistant reports 4% of all their users use the MyQ integration. 

 

Not to be outdone, Amazon recently closed off access to an API that allows Home Assistant users to trigger their smart speakers to play media files and control playback. The GitHub issues thread is flooded with users reporting problems with the integration. No official word from Aamzon on this yet. 

 

Quotes

Quote

Chamberlain Group recently made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of our myQ ecosystem through third-party apps.

This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience for our 10 million+ users, as well as our authorized partners who put their trust in us. We understand that this impacts a small percentage of users, but ultimately this will improve the performance and reliability of myQ, benefiting all of our users.

We encourage those who were impacted to check out our authorized partners 

 

Key post on the thread from a Home Assistant developer trying to contact Chamberlin to become an "authorized partner":

Quote

Q) Why don’t you just make Home Assistant a supported partner of MyQ?

A) This is not something MyQ seems interested in. I reached out September 27th to get added to the Works with MyQ portal. On September 28th - It routed me to someone in sales who has been attempting to help me and connect me with someone in corporate. October 4th I followed up, and was told I should hear from someone in a few days. October 12th- I followed up again and was told again my request was forwarded to someone in corporate. October 19th - I followed up once more and heard nothing. I sent one more follow up this morning, October 23rd, and I let them know I was planning to recommend all of our users to ditch MyQ, and they told me they forwarded the request to their boss to try to get corporate to respond. But I am not optimistic.

 

My thoughts

Another day, more cloud based smart home services actively or passively screw their customers over. I had an automation to trigger an echo in my 1yo's room to play lullabies if she woke up during the night. Guess i need to buy a Sonos speaker now. 

 

Sources

https://chamberlaingroup.com/press/a-message-about-our-decision-to-prevent-unauthorized-usage-of-myq

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/the-current-state-of-myq-from-the-codeowner/630623

https://github.com/custom-components/alexa_media_player/issues/2090

[jaslion]

2 minutes ago, madsci1016 said:

performance and reliability"

So translated:

 

The performance of after sales money making was too low so we are now forcing our customers to subscribe to our services to use their garage door. This will up the reliable income each month drastically!

 

And they wonder why people hardware hack their shit.

 

Amazon yeah not surprised. They never wanted people to go outside their ecosystem anyway. Basically was just a look at us being nice thingy to then remove it later.

 

Gotta love this you own nothing future.

[Fasterthannothing]

I'm sorry but if you're running home assistant and then complaining a cloud service is shutdown rendering it useless then YOU MISSED THE ENTIRE PLOTLINE! Seriously someone running home assistant is usually done because they want to control their own cloud. Every single smart device I buy I can run on my home Network and the company could disappear off the face of the planet and my smart devices would still work. Does that limit my choices and increase cost exponentially absolutely but it's worth it.

[darknessblade]

1 hour ago, jaslion said:

So translated:

 

The performance of after sales money making was too low so we are now forcing our customers to subscribe to our services to use their garage door. This will up the reliable income each month drastically!

 

And they wonder why people hardware hack their shit.

 

Amazon yeah not surprised. They never wanted people to go outside their ecosystem anyway. Basically was just a look at us being nice thingy to then remove it later.

 

Gotta love this you own nothing future.

True, didn't Philips use the same excuse with HUE, when they moved to cloud/account services, instead of a 100% locally run hub?

[jaslion]

1 minute ago, darknessblade said:

True, didn't Philips use the same excuse with HUE, when they moved to cloud/account services, instead of a 100% locally run hub?

Yup!

[madsci1016]

14 minutes ago, Fasterthannothing said:

 Does that limit my choices and increase cost exponentially absolutely 

In this case, you are berating us for choosing to NOT rip out an appliance that likely came with our home, so you need to add "Adding to the ewaste problem" to that list of your choices too. 

 

Not to mention Chamberlin owns LiftMaster®, Chamberlain®, Merlin® and Grifco® and thus has an almost monopoly on the garage door opener market. 

 

So your "this is your fault" attituded is pretty complicated in this case and not really helpful.  Yes, we will hack around this with by throwing more money at our garage doors to buy third party local api smart button pushers, and it's even more complicated if your garage door opener has encryption on the two wires running to the push button (like many now do). But we should never stop being upset and pushing back on these behaviors by companies. 

 

 

[jaslion]

47 minutes ago, Fasterthannothing said:

I'm sorry but if you're running home assistant and then complaining a cloud service is shutdown rendering it useless then YOU MISSED THE ENTIRE PLOTLINE! Seriously someone running home assistant is usually done because they want to control their own cloud. Every single smart device I buy I can run on my home Network and the company could disappear off the face of the planet and my smart devices would still work. Does that limit my choices and increase cost exponentially absolutely but it's worth it.

The issue is that for garage doors this company literally has a monopoly in MANY parts of the world. So you literally can NOT choose to not have one of these.

 

We are seeing this more and more that the smart features are forced into all equipment possible so you simply can't buy one without as these smart features are prime data collectors to get more money after sale.

 

 

[Erioch]

It broke for Home Assistant as well.  I'll find another solution (I already have one in mind) and will dump their app altogether.

[Arika]

me sitting here without any bullshit IOT devices that can be broken at any time by greedy or lazy as fuck companies

 

 

fuck smart homes, fuck internet connected anythings that should never even have internet.

[Fasterthannothing]

2 hours ago, jaslion said:

The issue is that for garage doors this company literally has a monopoly in MANY parts of the world. So you literally can NOT choose to not have one of these.

 

We are seeing this more and more that the smart features are forced into all equipment possible so you simply can't buy one without as these smart features are prime data collectors to get more money after sale.

 

 

A garage door is not a monopoly the stupid things are literally the simplest things to control even if the things are encrypted you could just straight up buy those smart button pushers 

[BorkBorkBork]

2 hours ago, jaslion said:

The issue is that for garage doors this company literally has a monopoly in MANY parts of the world. So you literally can NOT choose to not have one of these.

 

We are seeing this more and more that the smart features are forced into all equipment possible so you simply can't buy one without as these smart features are prime data collectors to get more money after sale.

 

 

^^
not only this, but these features including third-party access were marketed as a key selling point of the hardware to begin with. Like on the box itself. 
 

Chamberlain themselves specifically sold a dedicated Home Bridge kit to make it work easier with independent home automators. And they put out a press release earlier this year talking about how open their APIs are for other MyQ product lines.  
 

Then they killed the bridge product without warning and a year later killed their entire API while still insisting it’s a platform that can works with multiple partners. 
 

It’s all just a false advertising money grab by corporate swindlers. Anyone saying “yeah, duh, you should have made your own local solution” is missing the plot - we paid for this feature set specifically. 

[jaslion]

7 hours ago, Fasterthannothing said:

A garage door is not a monopoly the stupid things are literally the simplest things to control even if the things are encrypted you could just straight up buy those smart button pushers 

You can but that is then doing a hardware modification because of stupid design.

 

Btw it is a monopoly as they own almost every brand that does these save for some chinese ones.

 

Basically one big company with a bunch of daughter companies to make it look like its not a monopoly

 

You are also missing the main point a bit here.

 

The point being that this was a main feature. People could control the product THEY OWN in ways they liked via either a official hardware bridge box or a api key. Both of which were killed off.

 

Its quite literally a big selling point on the box of the stuff

 

Now people cant and have to resort to old way like a clicker which if they can find a way around those they would

[Mark Kaine]

13 hours ago, Fasterthannothing said:

A garage door is not a monopoly the stupid things are literally the simplest things to control even if the things are encrypted you could just straight up buy those smart button pushers 

people had automatic garage doors decades ago lol... the problem is people want everything online,  usb, wifi, cloud... they do not want simple solutions,  otherwise they would buy them. 

[starsmine]

honestly should be in tech news. 

It honestly baffles me that home automation is so bad today when we had solid systems for it in the 90s. None of this should be hard to interact with. 

The fact that you need to build these systems bespoke to get to the same functionality we had back 30 years ago because of issues like this. I dont get it.

[sazrocks]

Why was this moved to general discussion? This should be in Tech news. I am personally affected by this and it is pretty upsetting to lose a significant amount of functionality for my garage doors.

[starsmine]

6 minutes ago, sazrocks said:

Why was this moved to general discussion? This should be in Tech news. I am personally affected by this and it is pretty upsetting to lose a significant amount of functionality for my garage doors.

Op didn’t follow format. 

[madsci1016]

56 minutes ago, sazrocks said:

Why was this moved to general discussion? This should be in Tech news. I am personally affected by this and it is pretty upsetting to lose a significant amount of functionality for my garage doors.

 

2 hours ago, starsmine said:

honestly should be in tech news. 

It honestly baffles me that home automation is so bad today when we had solid systems for it in the 90s. None of this should be hard to interact with. 

The fact that you need to build these systems bespoke to get to the same functionality we had back 30 years ago because of issues like this. I dont get it.

49 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Op didn’t follow format. 

I did post in tech news but this OP had posted in general before me, and mods moved my post from tech news to combine it with this thread. I agree i wish they hadn't. Good case on "First!" not always being better, i followed format and posted in the correct place, if anything this OPs general post should have been moved to that thread. 

 

[BorkBorkBork]

6 minutes ago, madsci1016 said:

 

I did post in tech news but this OP had posted in general before me, and mods moved my post from tech news to combine it with this thread. I agree i wish they hadn't. 

 

I did a quick search before posting and didn't see any posts about it - but I had no idea where to put a topic like this since I'm still fairly new to the forums. I want it to be wherever it works best for everyone. Apologies for the misplace - mods are welcome to move it/merge it to the tech news section. 

[madsci1016]

2 minutes ago, BorkBorkBork said:

I did a quick search before posting and didn't see any posts about it - but I had no idea where to put a topic like this since I'm still fairly new to the forums. I want it to be wherever it works best for everyone. Apologies for the misplace - mods are welcome to move it/merge it to the tech news section. 

Not a big deal, don't worry about it. Mostly wish the mods that merged them would have handled it better. I searched for "MyQ' before posting too, and it didn't return your post as a result. So either search just sucks or the prompt was too short. 

[Yoinkerman]

Does the button still work?

[Erioch]

25 minutes ago, Yoinkerman said:

Does the button still work?

Which button?  The one I have in Home Assistant?  No.

[madsci1016]

Neither does my automation to control my garage air conditioner based off the open /  closed status of my garage door. 

[Yoinkerman]

19 hours ago, Erioch said:

Which button?  The one I have in Home Assistant?  No.

Don't they come with several hard buttons ?