Home Assistant Integration

Wow, interesting. So because Wyze has resisted providing open APIs, people have worked around it, the workaround is using up their resources, and they had to threaten, I mean amicably work with the independent developer.

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WOW! That is incredible! Thank you for sharing. I am grateful to Wyze for having this conversation instead of just cutting it off (which they could’ve easily done). I love the wording of “we are planning a way forward to continue the integration with HA” and happy to be good a citizen of their platform. I mean, I am one of those users, and yet, last year Wyze sent me an email saying I was among their 2% of customers. I have every subscription they offer now (legacy Person Detection, Cam Plus Unlimited, HMS, Sprinkler Plus, etc)…I would venture to say that is the main reason why we account for 50% of their traffic. Yes, Wyze may have Millions of different customers, but the majority of their most loyal and top customers that bring them the most business and PROFIT like me are the ones who also like other integrations such as Home Assistant. So it’s a distortion to say that only a few people use Home Assistant…yes, that may be true, but obviously the MAJORITY of their overall business, not just total users but total income base (over 50% apparently) are the ones who really want these API integrations.

That is something Wyze needs to keep in mind. Not the number of people (many people might just buy a single cam or something), but consider that those like me who have over 100 Wyze devices who make them the most money and tell everyone else I know how awesome Wyze is (and thus bring them TONS more money) are the ones they should really be catering to because in the end it pays off to cater to your top user base this way. That’s the perspective I am taking from this and hopefully Wyze keeps in mind. Don’t just think about individual customers who many only have a couple devices and never buy another thing from you ever again, think about those of us who bring in the majority of your business, both directly ourselves and as other people the awesome home automations we set up and show to everyone else.

Just last week, my teenage daughter brought 2 of her friends to our new house for the first time and as she was showing them around our house, I overheard her ask them if they anything from Wyze and proceeded to tell them how awesome Wyze was at letting us do all this cool stuff with our house. That was free advertising for Wyze right there.

In many ways, The Home Assistant integration is bringing in more money for them that it is taking away. It would be insane to kill it off…at worst they should make it official and build in their own integration so they can actually get better data from it and profit off the non-personalized stuff better like they can through the app.

I just hope nobody looks at that stat and misinterprets it. When I hear it, what it tells me is that if Home Assistant people are drawing more than half of all their traffic, they need to quit manipulating the report and saying hardly anyone cares. What it should tell you is that your primary users including your Influencers and top customers are the ones who want it, not some random one time customer who wants to look at their dog and never pays for a subscription. I have EVERYTHING from them (besides the watch…and that only because there is no API for it) including all the subscriptions and Home Assistant compatibility is still my #1 priority request from them. It’s not making me cancel all my subscriptions, in fact the subscriptions ENHANCE everything.

If they were smart, they could do the Home Assistant integration themselves and build extra features into it by having the subscriptions. Let me use pet detection as a trigger, or package detection, or configure more awesome stuff with my thermostat and sprinkler. You will INCREASE your income if you do it right from all the people like me who are bringing you the most money.

I’m just saying, that’s what I get out of this facts release. All it tells me is an overwhelming scream that this integration should be one of their biggest priorities because we Home Assistant users are their primary influencers and will drive more business to them, and give them even more of our own business, which is obviously SUBSTANTIAL if half of all interaction comes from us.

Thanks for sharing, that is the best news I’ve heard on this in a while. Wyze is taking it seriously, and in the next AMA I am going to make sure to make this perspective clear…stop thinking of us as just a small fraction that don’t matter and realize we are your influencers giving you the most profit and driving most of your new business in one way or another. That’s what I think (hope).

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I agree with a lot of whet you say. I would also like to see an API of some sort and some integrations. I have not messed with Home Assistant much though, however I don’t think that the <1% of users that account for 50% of the traffic account for 50% of the money brought in either. I do believe it is greater than 1% though. The problem lies in the way the status has to be constantly pulled since Wyze is not pushing the state changes. I see points from both sides and hope they can find a way to keep it going and not cut HA completely off.

Note: I am speaking as a Wyze user and not really as a Mod with any inside information. The only things I know on this are what has been posted in the forum.

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Well put, in more words than I could muster. Might be a point to make during the AMA how many products we’ve bought and how little they’ve been supported. For example, my next robot vacuum is not going to be from Wyze, and I regret spending $25 on the watch, and not a nice meal.

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Thanks Jason, I [personally at least] almost always assume by default that you are speaking as yourself unless you make it fairly clear that you are speaking on behalf of Wyze or your mod status, but I do think it is good to give such disclaimers for everyone else who might take the opposite perspective and assume you’re always speaking for Wyze unless you say otherwise. :slight_smile:

Yeah, I don’t know what the percentages are or have enough data to truly make good judgments on this topic, I was half speaking out of excitement and hope. :slight_smile: I am sure there is something similar to the 80/20 rule involved, and Home Assistant isn’t even anywhere near that at this point, but still the top few percent will account for much more business than that same percent. It would be interesting to know how much. I do know there are also a bunch of major users who have Home Assistant, but have held back from the 3rd party HA integration because of fear (that it’s not official) or 2FA missing or several other things, so there are more who want it and like Home Assistant, but want a Wyze solution instead, so in some ways those numbers would or should be higher than they are.

I also wonder if the stats were based solely on Joshua’s plugin or if Wyze was speaking for ALL Home assistant hacks, including all the RTSP stuff, etc, and there are a few other plugins. Although the RTSP stuff SHOULD be mostly local, some of the hacks that aren’t true RTSP seem to need repeated authentication in some way. I wonder what is really using most of the traffic. I know Wyze said in the last AMA that they were working on improving their pipeline in some ways so that lots of data wouldn’t be a big expensive problem anymore. I hope it helps with this concern too. Still, I would really love to know more of those details, though I doubt Wyze will really share much, one thing is certain: Home Assistant definitely got their attention. I mean more than 50% at least says there is some kind of strong desire for all this, regardless of what the rest of the details are.

There are definitely a lot of questions still, but my magical thinking can be reasoned with. I think the truth is somewhere in between.

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We want integration with Google Home Assistant!!

Just found out that the Floor lamp I just purchased doesn’t work with HA either?? Come on!! Bad enough that it’s taking forever for other things (alarm, cameras, etc.), but this is a LAMP for gosh sakes!

The Floor Lamp runs off bluetooth and not WiFi so I doubt that there will be integrations for it

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Knowing wyze their will be a subscription to have control over the light later on. You’ll have to pay for the lightPLUS subscription or else wyze will turn the light on automatically during daytime hours and off during night. This is just the company youre dealing with. We all know they’re scum.

And don’t get any crazy ideas about sending it back because there’s a 99% chance that the request won’t properly submit or they will say that returns are shut down.

I’m divesting myself of all Wyze products and only purchasing devices with proven HA Integrations

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Hi Bill. Please DM me a list of what you want to get rid of. Maybe we can strike a deal.

@JustBill

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The fact that this top-voted wishlist item has been ignored for over 3 years and the fact that Wyze has recently demonstrated their ability and willingness to disrupt their customers’ ability to control their own devices leaves me regretting my early investment in dozens of Wyze devices. That latest unannounced rate-limiting issue has forced me to rethink having any devices that function solely through 3rd party cloud service (like Wyze). For 26 straight hours, I was unable to control my Wyze Bulbs and Wyze Plugs even through their own app due to them arbitrarily deciding to cut off all access from my IP address regardless of source.

It’s forced me to accelerate replacing all Wyze stuff in my home with standard protocol stuff that I have local and complete control over.

Wyze would have very little work in fulfilling this wishlist item… there are members of the community that would build the integration themselves if Wyze would just open a few of the existing API features and provide some documentation and access.

The big problem with local control is that once you give it to users you can’t really expect them to pay any potential future subscription service fees. That’s what I think is the root cause of their reluctance to do this.

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HA integration is a must for me, and if they have no solution within a few months I’ll have no choice but to look elsewhere and sell my stuff on Craigslist. I understand that as a business they need to keep their services online and this is a measure to help with the load, but that’s only because they haven’t provided the necessary api’s / integrations themselves. I’m hopeful they have a plan in place by now and will be announcing something soon.

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I’ve been a Wyze fan since almost the beginning, so I’d prefer if they didn’t shut down this HA integration, it makes my devices so much better. I wouldn’t want to sell my devices until they for sure lock it down

Interesting to see all this. I’ve been having issues with HA/Wyze for a few months and thought it was just my internet connection. Turned off my HA a while back having given up on making it work. This was most likely the reason it wouldn’t work.

Too bad, would have been nice.

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They aren’t immediately shutting down the integration after reaching a temporary agreement where the integration will disable the ability to poll binary sensor type devices (so any Wyze motion sensors, contact sensors, and the motion-detected status on all cameras). The integration was updated that first day and released as an update with those deprecations. Even with those concessions, there is no guarantee Wyze won’t rate-limit again or shut it down.

As far as my collection of devices goes: I’d much rather get the value out of them that I paid for, but not being able to control them when I need to makes them useless to me. Two more amazon deliveries this week and I’ll have decommissioned all my Wyze bulbs and plugs. It’s all going into box to be stowed away until either Wyze makes a change to ensure I’m not screwed again by their willingness to disrupt my access to their cloud service or I get sick and tired enough of looking at the box that I sell it.

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Geez, I just read the other threads here and on Reddit with everyone fighting about this issue, including the developer(s) of the HA App. It’s really heated with lots of vehement accusations and hurt feelings going around. Poor Mods who are stuck with deciding how to handle it all.

This one had the most info and Wyze employee responses:

The summary is that apparently Wyze instituted a Rate limit per IP address. A bunch of people were getting this new error code 3044.

This is mostly (but perhaps not solely) affecting Home Assistant users for 2 main reasons…they are the ones most likely to have LOTS of Wyze devices, and secondly, the HA Docker is doing “Polling” instead of a push system because Wyze refused for so many years to create their own API that would do pushing of just the things that needed pushed…so now the 3rd parties are doing “Polling” of everything which is hammering Wyze’s system hard. This is partially Wyze’s fault for ignoring the issue for so many years and requiring everyone to develop their own solutions. However, BANNING your biggest customers will also be a costly response…many of those who buy the most devices and are the primary influence on getting new customers will be offended and sell off all their devices and push people away from Wyze instead, so this decision will have some consequences. To Wyze’s credit they unbanned most of the banned IP addresses and gave a decent amount of communication in some of the threads about what’s going on, though I think they still have some kind of rate limit going on to disrupt service of their most active users. I personally haven’t used Home Assistant in a few weeks, so I didn’t suffer the ban myself, that I know of, but despite being 100% Wyze direct lately, I have noticed that my hallway lights automation and a few others haven’t been working reliably, and I am beginning to wonder if I am hitting a “rate limit” and Wyze temporarily disabling my devices simply because I have so many devives, even though they’re all being used through Wyze direct and I have all the subscriptions. This would be punishing me for being a loyal customer…I have nearly every product, tons of sensors, and every subscription, so of course my IP address will use a lot more than most others, because I have over 100 devices, but I also pay all the subscriptions, etc and I shouldn’t be punished for having more devices than others (quite the opposite), yet it sounds like this this new policy is doing exactly that…though it would be more realistic to base it per device owned, rather than per IP/User…otherwise you punish your most valuable clients the most every time.

Wyze did say they will continue to enforce some kind of a rate limit though, so if you have a lot of devices and it seems like your stuff goes in and out from working correctly, it sounds like it could have something to with Wyze thinking we have too many of their devices? I hope that is a misunderstanding or a mistake as I would think Wyze would want to encourage users to buy as much as possible, and not punish those who do…I mean, I do have devices from several other companies, but I’ve always treated Wyze as my primary main company, and this rate limit issue sounds like Wyze might be telling me I should spread out my purchases to other companies more so I don’t risk hitting their rate limits and having my devices disconnected for a while. That would be very sad…I mean, I don’t hate Eufy and others, but I would prefer to feel safe having as many Wyze devices as I want without risking my security by being put on IP use probation or something. I honestly am moderately concerned about this new rate limit issue affecting all their top customers…even those like me who pay for all the subscriptions, etc.

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Hopefully the next thing wyze announces is chapter 13.

I COMPLETELY disagree. A Chapter 13 never has ANY POSITIVE for ANYONE. I would never hope for that extreme on someone compared to other options.

Hopefully Wyze’s “working together to move forward” on Home Assistant with Joshua as they said they would results in Wyze either finally doing their own official public API, or else in the shorter term helping Joshua be able to use pushes instead polling in the HA app which would help resolve their main issue and still allow continued use without straining their limited resources (servers, etc) so badly.

I like Wyze a lot and am very supportive, but for anyone who isn’t, it’s a simple answer, sell off any remaining Wyze stuff…it still sells for a decent price used, and then move on to something that better suits intended needs at a higher cost. It’s really that simple. I’ve done it with other companies. When I disliked a company, I sold off all their stuff I had, and moved on with my life. I deleted my account from their forums and never thought back on it. There was no point in continuing to frequent forums of companies I hated, it would only make my life worse, and actually benefit them. ANY publicity is positive publicity and turns into more money. Even complaining in their forums or social media, just brings them more attention and money. This has been fairly conclusively proven. The opposite of love is not Hate, it’s indifference. So if I have a falling out with a company, I just disown them entirely and move on with life completely without them. I still love Wyze and I trust they’ll get this sorted out to a reasonable end in the long term as they always have to my satisfaction. I don’t think this will be any different.

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I first heard this eons ago regarding the success of this guy.

image

The man you love to hate.

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Or we could voice our opinions and frustration with a company after we’ve been ripped off and help to prevent other home automation enthusiasts from making a really bad mistake like others did. Instead of hiding the issue and just selling off your broken stuff to some unwitting person who just saved up enough money to grab a few new items.

Just because this company scams people doesn’t mean the people that got burned should screw over others. [mod edit] is that a running theme with this company and it’s users? What a cesspool.