Just got this email from Haier (US) who seems to be distancing themselves from the EU division’s decision to block Home Assistance.
Hello <name>, (I changed this)
Thank you for reaching out with your concern.
The Haier brand in the U.S. is independent of Haier Europe and operates separately. hOn is the connected IOT platform for Haier Europe. In the U.S., consumers can use our open IOT platform, SmartHQ. SmartHQ does not prevent integrations with Home Assistant.
We appreciate you reaching out.
Kindest regards,
Digital Engagement Team Haier Appliances
Hopefully it was escalated it up to Haier global or whatever. Brand reputatio issues n in eu can be damaging to their US counterparts
It almost assuredly was not escalated to global. I received the same canned answer from them earlier and asked to be put in contact with a person from the European company.
Their response was to send me here: https://www.haier-europe.com/en_GB/technical-assistance/contact-us/
If you poke around, you’ll find that there is no effective way to contact anyone by email unless you’ve got a specific support question with a model number attached, so I sent an email directly to support.ecommerce@haier-europe.com
Will it matter for anything? Probably not. Will at least one guy have to read some stern words about an attack on open source development? Yep, and that’s good enough for me I guess :P
That doesn’t mean the issue wasn’t/won’t be escalated. It might even mean it’s more likely since someone bothered to make a response macro for it, they presumably got more than one or two emails about it. So it’s probably more likely to make it on a “list of issues we saw this week/sprint/month/quarter”.