Over the last week, garage door product company Chamberlain made a sudden move to cut off all third-party access to it’s cloud APIs. Chamberlain was known for making products like garage door openers and control products, but had begun offering cloud connected smart devices to go along with these in recent years. These smart garage door control products were sold in big box hardware stores like Lowes and were advertised with Amazon and Google compatibility at relatively low prices. (update: the package I purchased did not mention anything about third party systems, only that you could download the app for your phone via the App Store or Google Play.)

While we were going through a renovation project at our home, I wanted to be able to integrate our garage door openers with a smart controller so that I could open the doors for a contractor/sub if they sent someone who didn’t have the code, or had trouble with the external keypad. Chamberlain’s MyQ smart garage door controller seemed to have all the right options. Low cost, compatibility with major home automation systems from Apple, Google, Amazon and even Homeassistant integrations. It seemed like a no-brainer. Remote access to the garage door worked out great for the renovation project and I later integrated the system into my existing Homeassistant setup.

This setup worked perfectly until this week when Chamberlain made the decision to cut off API access to Homeassistant and any other “unauthorized” third party. Chamberlain claims that Homeassistant traffic was overwhelming at times, (to the point of effectively being a DDOS attack) and used that as an excuse to shut it down. However, this doesn’t seem to be the true motivation as they’ve also been slowly backing away from all external integrations they don’t directly control. This leaves consumers of their devices with products that may not work as advertised, controllable only via the smartphone app.

This is the danger inherent in cloud based consumer products. They may be cheap and they might work today, but the manufacturer can change the functionality at will and there’s little to nothing that you can do about it. Devices you paid good money for can become a paperweight overnight when the manufacturer decides they no longer want to support it, or wants to change the terms of service. (perhaps charge fees for access to features that were once free) This seems to be the case with Chamberlain, seeking payment for access to APIs and courting paid integrations with automotive manufacturers and security companies.

If you are looking to build a smart home system and you’re thinking about which device ecosystem to go with, I would highly recommend doing your research. Look for devices with local control via Z-wave, Zigbee, Matter, or Thread. WiFi products can work too, but make sure their core functions aren’t tied to a cloud service that could go away at any time.