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After 16 years, Ecobee is shutting down support for the original smart thermostat
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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Thermostats are easy to change out. So this isn't a huge deal. But I don't love the idea that tech isn't built to be self-hosted or maintained in any meaningful way. If you're not shipping an open source version of your software when you close up, you're an asshole.
Yeah, self hosting isn't for most lay people if it's just a GitHub repo. But GitHub repos quickly become adopted by nerds like me who build tooling around it that eventually let lay people self host software with the click of a button.
If ecobee put their backend code on GitHub, I bet it would be self hostable with docker within a week.
Newer versions are Homekit compatible and can be controlled over the local network.
As long as HomeKit remains a thing.
Home assistant can talk to homekit devices without involving Apple, so you can assume it'll be around for a while.
Yeah, 100%. Home assistant can basically connect to any damn thing. Home assistant is going to be the fall back for a lot of legacy iot devices and platforms.
Not quite everything. The stuff that calls home to their own servers can't be saved by home assistant. If you take care to buy stuff that can be controlled locally, you're more likely to have some longevity out of your devices.
It is a standard. I don't know how you can make it not be a thing once it is implemented.
But it’s not an open standard, and all of the 3rd party home kit apps are basically a new client for services that Apple develops.
I say this as someone who sticks with HomeKit because I think it’s one of the better IOT solutions if you care about for privacy and security. My home is all HomeKit compatible. Lutron, Eve, and homebridge for odds and ends.
But I’m fully aware that, if Apple decided to pull the plug, I’d probably be running some sort of local home brewed HomeKit clone on a raspberry pi to keep the network alive.
HomeAssistant is HomeKit compatible and could probably do everything you've got going now locally
It is also nice that these just degrade to regular thermostats. It isn't like they are completely stopping working. It would be nice if you could swap out the API, or they keep the API running longer (how much work can maintaining it be?). But this sounds like a pretty graceful degradation.
It would be nice to have these speak some common Zigbee protocol or similar. But this isn't the worst behaviour I have seen from companies.
Are you aware of a decent number of mainstream products that didn't go full asshole? I agree with you absolutely, but I feel like the majority of connected products pull this same shit.
Yeah the majority do it and I think it's bad.
This is pretty much what happened with HomeAssistant. Tying all the integrations together in one platform.
It's now at the stage of "copy these files to a pi/buy this box we make"
The overall aim is to integrate most open things, and find ways to work with/around more closed off products.
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