Chamberlain blocks smart garage door openers

While we are talking about taking away owners rights, Ars Technica tells us that Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes:

Chamberlain Group—the owner of most of the garage door opener brands like LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin, and Grifco—would like its customers to stop doing smart home things with its “myQ” smart garage door openers. The company recently issued a statement decrying “unauthorized usage” of its smart garage door openers.

In short if you wanted to use your Chamberlain garage door opener without being dependent on their cloud and app, they have now removed that feature.

And concerning their android app:

“Sadly, this app now displays advertisement at the very top and I cannot find a way to disable it,” writes one Play Store reviewer

Ah yeah, “displaying ads”. Every piece of software will end up being used to display ads (or upsell something).

Given the service has a cost to operate, I expect them to issue down the line more notices about shutting the service, or phasing out older devices, or anything to cut costs. And given their dominance at least on the US market, they’ll surely get away with it.

If they remove a feature, are they stealing?