Chamberlain is making a huge mistake — Jason Michael Perry

One of my first smart home purchases was the Chamberlain MyQ smart garage door opener, and for one year, it was clunky but did the job. Eventually, the battery in one of its sensors died. It took me a week to find and order a new replacement battery, and from that day on, the integrations with HomeKit stopped working, and my constant calls for support fell on deaf ears.

Without HomeKit, the product sucked. What made it great was that CarPlay intuitively suggested I wanted to open the garage door when I neared my house, opening the door from my watch in two taps when taking out the garage, or asking Siri (and then authenticating on my phone). Better yet, I could chain together automation to turn on the garage lights when I open the door after sunset and to unlock the associated garage door.

It’s obvious Chamberlain is clueless about smart homes, and today, it is making its product less helpful by breaking with a growing ecosystem of interconnected smart home devices. Even if its bet is to integrate with cars instead of Amazon, Google, or Apple’s growing ecosystem, it seems like they still need to remember that the lion’s share of drivers would happily abandon their horrible car interfaces for Android Auto or Apple CarPlay.

This is frankly a dumb move, and it makes me happy I trashed my MyQ for a Meross Garage Door Opener that works MUCH MUCH better than without batteries and a costly hub.

Do yourself a favor and trash the Chamberlain for a product that gets it.

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