Comment by wat10000

4 days ago

What ongoing maintenance is required beyond what would be needed to keep their app working for future sales anyway?

7 comments

wat10000

Reply
faangguyindia  3 days ago

You need to keep paying influencers to promote it; otherwise, influencers threaten to promote other products and drop yours. Marketing is a big cost for these products.

Just like MacroFactor pays a lot of people to promote it, it has to pay people, which means the money has to come from the customers.

lokar  4 days ago

They do need to keep up with API changes. But that’s not that hard. Even then, they could expose a stable local API so someone else can maintain the adapter.

  • haute_cuisine  4 days ago

    Why would someone else maintain the adapter? Would they be charging for maintenance (or selling data / network) as well? What company should give their business to somebody else?

    I assume writing and maintaining apps across all stack of devices is real work that someone has to do full time with a decent level of quality. Unfortunately, you can't just ship software and call it done, even without adding features, new devices are getting released, new OS versions are getting released, new security updates are getting released, server infra has to be maintained and patched.

    I feel that all this work isn't getting appreciated and many think that this should be offloaded to somebody else to be done for free. They already offer a free app with free CSV export.

    Also, they just might have taken on too much scope and paying for all that scope isn't sustainable from hardware sales alone, unless people continue to buy, but at some point all who would buy will have their devices and scope can't be covered anymore.

    • lokar  4 days ago

      I would give it a shot. Home assistant is full of adapters like this.

      I though the CSV export was manual, you can’t automate it.

      2 replies →

  • wat10000  4 days ago

    Right, but they need to keep up with those changes to support their continuing sales anyway, so it’s “free” to keep supporting the existing installed base too.