Today’s paper (Chicago Trib) had an article from the NYT titled “Device puts you in control of your garage door.” (Apologies - unable to link.) Apparently a service connecting garage door openers to smart phones (MyQ) had been enshittified, and some guy came up with a device that would connect a garage door opener to phone using Apple Home or some other app.
As a whole, the article was a pretty good description of enshittification. But what shocked me was that the article did not have a single mention of the garage door openers I have known since I have had a garage. We have a “clicker” (the technical term!) clipped to the visor in each of our cars, a button near the interior door to the house, and a keypad on the outside. How is controlling the opener from your phone is an improvement over that system? Even if you always have your phone out and available (which I don’t), wouldn’t you still need to at least find and open the appropriate app? Not sure how that is an improvement to touching a clicker/button - which can easily be done without looking. Or can it be done “hands-free”? The ONLY possible benefit I could imagine would be if I had left home and was unsure whether I had closed the door. In such case, I suppose I the app might allow me to ensure that the door was closed from a distance. But, ya know, that can be avoided by just developing the habit of watching the door close as you leave…
The “old school” system becomes all the more appealing to ward against enshittification. The new system this guy invented seems to require setting up and installing some sort of device - which seems no less effort than the old system. I recall when we had our new door and opener installed a couple of years ago, there was the option of connecting it to our phone. We had no interest in doing so, and the installer acted as tho we were nuts.
The article does end up with a recommendation that one can avoid enshittification by purchasing “dumb” devices. But it mentons refrigerators, dishwashers, exercise bikes and coffee makers. Have “smart” openers become so pervasive that the readers of this newspaper article would not even notice the omission of reference to non-networked openers?
26 is only 7 hours old, and I’m already feeling old!
I am 100% with you here. This seems to be vastly outweighed by the disadvantages. Even without enshittification, if the company and its servers are guaranteed to be online for ever without a hiccup, why would anyone ever buy this product? Why would you buy a product that will only let you in your house if you have a working cell phone connected to the network (and a network device the other end that is working and connected to the internet). Don’t you ever lose your phone? Not have reception? Have a router fail? All of those seem to be far far more likely than driving off and forgetting to close my garage door (and far more serious, where I live right now leaving my garage door open would just be irritating I would not be instantly burgled, admittedly that might not be true in San Francisco but who has a private garage in San Francisco ).
And that’s not even considering the obvious fact that companies go bust, they get taken over, product lines are cancelled, servers go down, why would I make my ability to get in my house dependent on those things not happening?
I’ve had the MyQ system for a while and it worked fine, until it no longer worked at all. Did not use it to normally operate the door while in the vehicle, but when my house cleaners showed up I could open the door if I were not home. Or a neighbor needed a tool, “OK Sam, it’s in the garage, I’ll open the door for you”
Did it solve a pressing issue? No, not really, but it was a convenience. Also worked with Alexa products.
After a few years the system stopped working and I needed to replace the opener. The new one works with it’s own App on the phone.
Though that seems vastly inferior to an alarm system. If you want that functionality get an alarm system. I am not a fan of Internet connected alarm systems but I see the actual real advantage they give for things like this, but this product seems to give basically zero upside for a whole bunch of downside
I wonder if burglars would be more likely to break into my house via the garage door, as opposed to the various ground-level windows and entry doors. Plus, I understand there is a possibility of such devices being hacked.
Similar here. I’m periodically surprised to see doors on attached garages standing open in my neighborhood - including apparently overnight when I walk the dog early in the morning. Perhaps those people routinely lock their interior access doors from their garages.
I guess it comes down to people weighing the costs/benefits differently. Some feel it worthwhile to be able to avoid watching their door close, or if they are forgetful of such things. Or they fear burglars accessing their homes through their garage. They feel that outweighs any associated costs.
Whereas others don’t perceive those as significant benefits, and view the potential costs as greater.
my house cleaners showed up I could open the door if I were not home. Or a neighbor needed a tool,
Neither of those occurred to me. Nor do they apply to me. Don’t have house cleaners, and I couldn’t imagine anyone calling to borrow a tool when I wasn’t home.
I wonder how many folk adopting smart openers don’t even conduct this sort of cost/benefit analysis and, instead, just figure they will use their phone do do pretty much whatever can be done with their phone. Open garage door, turn lights/appliances on and off…
The MyQ opener comes with a standard push button remote, so I don’t have to just use my phone.
Its also more likely that a company with a large customer base will not just go out of business , but be bought out by a competitor. I believe this happened to the Genie garagedoor opener business in 1994.
Everything is smart now, and it’s a pain in the ass if you’re not interested in the tech for whatever reason. I recently replaced my dishwasher; I wanted a top-end model for good cleaning and very quiet operation. But I had to spend a fair amount of research time pre-qualifying all the potential manufacturers and models to ensure the dishwasher I ended up buying would only optionally connect to shit via wi-fi, and that all the features would operate without problems if I chose not to hook it up to an app. Definitely annoying.
I couple of years ago I was housesitting for my brother while he and his family traveled overseas. They had to leave earlier than expected and thus weren’t able to physically hand over any keys, but they had previously had me install the app to their garage door opener on my phone, so, using that, I was able to get into their house without any trouble (and they were able to see that I had done so).
Our garage door installer provided an app for opening/closing the doors, which we never use, preferring the hand-held opener.
The disadvantage to that is the possibility of someone breaking into your car, stealing the opener and using car registration info to race over and burgle your garage and/or home. There’s not much in the way of car break-ins in our area and we always stow the garage opener out of sight to lessen temptation.
FYI, here is a gift link to the original article on the New York Times website. It ties the issue with the garage door opener gizmo to the “right to repair” movement.
The old systems worked great, if you lived someplace where you could leave your doors unlocked. Because that’s effectively what they did. There was almost no security. You could drive up a random street in suburbia clicking your garage door opener, and about one in ten garages would open.
A lot of internet-connected systems, admittedly, have lousy security, too. But even the worst of them are probably more secure than that.
We do. We have once or twice left our garage door open (on coming home, not on leaving home), and rather than burgling us, a neighbor came over and let us know it had been open for a while.
I don’t want some app having the ability to open my garage door. I don’t want some app listening to my conversations at home. Basically, I want to interact with as few apps as possible. The brave new world can take a flying leap, as far as I’m concerned.
We have the MyQ system. I essentially never use it.
The openers themselves have timers, which address the biggest issue - forgetting to close the garage door. Being able to open it with my iPhone is handy in case I ever get locked outside without an opener (by the above-mentioned timers). But - I don’t know if I’ve ever used that feature (maybe once, when I was doing something outside, and I walked away to talk to my neighbor, and came back to find the garage door closed).
Being able to open the garage door with a 3rd-party app allowed me to do something amusing - I created a Siri shortcut, which would open the door when I said “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.”
That no longer works, due to the whole MyQ enshitification, but it’s a small loss.
I have a MyQ garage and it’s very useful for me. It came with two mechanical clickers.
The main reason that I got it is that I have some sort of brain lock where I sometimes forget to use the clicker to close the garage when I get home. At night, I can’t tell if the garage is open or closed from looking out the window. Now I can look on my phone and tell and close it if needed. Telling me to “just” use the clicker isn’t helpful.
One other nice thing, which admittedly I’ve only done twice, is the ability to open the door remotely when I wasn’t home and I needed to give someone garage access.
It doesn’t have the problem of the clicker battery dying which of course is very occasional.
One nice thing which isn’t worth getting a system for but I use because I have it is the garage automatically opening when I get home and closing when I leave. It’s barely incrementally better than the mechanical clicker.
I would never do this but you can see it up so delivery drivers can put packages inside with a one use code.
I suppose I could google this myself, but do you have any support for this assertion? Pretty sure that for the last 2 openers we bought (which will go back at least 15 years) you programmed in an individual code and synchronized the clickers when setting it up. I forget how many variables the code has.
I also suppose that there may be a correlation of folk who like to do a lot of things on their phones. I imagine folk may tend to divide along a spectrum between thinking, “This is so handy!” vs “This is so unnecessary.”
My garage door system, installed in 2006, is supposed to use “billions of rolling codes” which was not susceptible even to someone capturing and reproducing the “code” generated by my clicker.
The one in the old house, installed in 1994, apparently was susceptible to this, but the number of codes that were available to “learn” and synchronize between receiver and clicker was in the hundreds of thousands.
Maybe what you’re describing happened even earlier than that and someone is still using a 50 year old system (which as a 30 year old I wouldn’t have believed possible, but now as I approach retirement age seems more conceivable).
In the old days, and I’m not sure how old this is but at most 30 years ago, you got a clicker that matched the garage and that was that. There were only so many frequencies. One of my friend’s kids would make a game of it and could open other garages when the parents drove around.
