Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Why does a garage door need an API?

Two reasons:

1. My wife can check that we didn't forget to close it instead of driving 20 minutes back home to quell her nerves.

2. We can let a friend or neighbor into the garage (or into the house if we use the smart lock on the door inside the garage) when we're not home. Without giving permanent access to a key or PIN code.

My chamberlain remote pad opener from like 2012 has “burner” codes that operate a certain number of times, down to a single use. I have one programmed if I need to let someone in.

> 1. My wife can check that we didn't forget to close it instead of driving 20 minutes back home to quell her nerves.

Seems like a bit of an ill-adaptation. I used to want a smart door lock for exactly this reason, but instead I learned to be mindful when I close my dumb door...

You can teach yourself to be mindful, how about the other people in the house? Or will you personally check it every time the house is empty?

They do the same, and I trust them...

My garage was broken into. The open door warning is how I found out.

Let me know how you feel after you're married.

To allow remote control. Of course this is silly and the real answer is to make you dependent on their app which shows you ads.

Also many smaller smart home device manufacturers with an app seem to be heading in the direction of wanting to expand into other smart home devices and lock you into their proprietary ecosystem, while the rest of the industry simultaneously seems to move towards more interoperability via things like the Matter protocol, presumably to make it easier to interact with various voice assistants without requiring an individual gateway for each one.

This is just another reason to distrust any smart home device that doesn't support ZigBee, Matter, or a similar purpose-built local protocol.

Maybe so people will get alarmed when the garage opens, while they are not at home? Or for them to open the garage remotely for deliveries, workers or visitors. Does this system support this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com