Thankfully I don’t use any of their products, but this really pisses me off. They claim that this open source project “causes significant economic harm to their company”
This is ridiculous. It is truly ridiculous. How can something that enables the user to efficiently control their AC cause “significant economic harm”???
Consider forking the repository or mirroring it to another platform like GitLab, Codeberg or your self-hosted Git server, so the project can continue to exist and someone can maybe fork it and maintain it.
The effected repos are: https://github.com/Andre0512/hOn and https://github.com/Andre0512/pyhOn
If you don’t know about Home Assistant, check it out. It’s an amazing piece of open-source software, that you can run at home on your own server and use it to control your smart home devices. That way, you don’t need to connect them to the manufacturer’s (probably insecure) cloud. It gives you sovereignty over your smart home instead of some proprietary vendor-locked garbage. Check out their website and the Lemmy community: !homeassistant@lemmy.world
I also highly recommend Louis Rossmann’s video about this: https://youtu.be/RcSnd3cyti0
He makes awesome videos in general, consider subscribing.
As Rossmann said, don’t ever buy anything from such a shitty company that doesn’t respect their customers. This move by Haier is nothing other than a slap in the face for everyone, who just wants to comfortably control the product they paid for. This company is actively hostile towards their paying customers. Fuck these bastards!
Generally, a lot of companies that add “cloud enabled” to their products don’t let you access the local device. Home Assistant isn’t talking to the air conditioner, it’s logging into their web interface. If it’s polling 1/minute, that can be a lot of extra traffic, compared to a normal user.
The better solution is to work with their buyers, not against them. If they provided a local API, then the excess traffic would go away. Theirs no money in that, in the short term, however. So they take the lazy route.
There’s a reason I only buy IoT type devices with a local API. They also have a tendency to turn servers off. Suddenly your smart device is bricked, despite working fine.