Just got this email from Haier (US) who seems to be distancing themselves from the EU division’s decision to block Home Assistance.
Hello <name>, (I changed this)
Thank you for reaching out with your concern.
The Haier brand in the U.S. is independent of Haier Europe and operates separately. hOn is the connected IOT platform for Haier Europe. In the U.S., consumers can use our open IOT platform, SmartHQ. SmartHQ does not prevent integrations with Home Assistant.
We appreciate you reaching out.
Kindest regards,
Digital Engagement Team Haier Appliances
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Independant my aching ass. Haier US is Haier corporate’s (Qindao) b*tch and everyone knows it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier
The only “smart” appliance to own is an offline appliance.
If an appliance is really smart, it will want to stay off-line.
lol someone who doesn’t know the disaster that is IoT downvoted you over that
It’s still a pretty good sign IMO. Brands won’t usually distance themselves from their parent companies unless they have a good reason to.
@RobotToaster @homeassistant
Parent company is chinese, the european branch is a sister: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier
Some are actually welcoming, and provide a local API. That way your air-conditioning control isn’t web dependent.
Unfortunately, most are quite stupid about it, and insist on using their app. This voids any usefulness of having smart appliances. E.g. pulse a light in a room when the tumble dryer finishes or turn it on and off dependent on your rooftop solar’s output.
turn it on and off dependent on your rooftop solar’s output
I love stuff like this. Turn on the dryer and put the window shades up when the sun’s out.
Not stupid, just greedy.
They’re gonna make money from selling whatever data they can mine from your mobile device and likely selling you monthly subscriptions.
Lazy would be a better description. They want the tech cred of having it be an IoT device. They also hope to leverage it to get more money. Unfortunately, the budget, and coherent drive for this isn’t there. The end result is a “designed by committee” app. It ticks all the boxes, but also misses all the things that would help actually get people using it.
If they were lazy they would have just not done anything and let the HA users carry on.
Just because 1 department is being lazy doesn’t mean their legal aren’t.
… Or has ZigBee/Z-Wave.
or KNX. or Modbus.
Zigbee is actually not that good of a choice.
Hopefully it was escalated it up to Haier global or whatever. Brand reputatio issues n in eu can be damaging to their US counterparts
It almost assuredly was not escalated to global. I received the same canned answer from them earlier and asked to be put in contact with a person from the European company.
Their response was to send me here: https://www.haier-europe.com/en_GB/technical-assistance/contact-us/
If you poke around, you’ll find that there is no effective way to contact anyone by email unless you’ve got a specific support question with a model number attached, so I sent an email directly to [email protected]
Will it matter for anything? Probably not. Will at least one guy have to read some stern words about an attack on open source development? Yep, and that’s good enough for me I guess :P
That doesn’t mean the issue wasn’t/won’t be escalated. It might even mean it’s more likely since someone bothered to make a response macro for it, they presumably got more than one or two emails about it. So it’s probably more likely to make it on a “list of issues we saw this week/sprint/month/quarter”.
