To receive a take down notice for an unofficial integration. While i’m fairly certain this could be fought as “fair use”, i’m also not a lawyer and it’s sad to see happening in general.
Here's Louis Rossmann with 2M subscribers talking about this:
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Such is the risk with unofficial, reverse-engineered cloud integrations--one reason I avoid them in general but especially for anything I'd consider important.
See also: MyQ. 
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The alternative is not to have an integration at all, so I am not sure how it's better
I find it hard to believe they could actually demonstrate that an unofficial, reverse-engineered integration like this damages them in a way that they’re entitled to anything in court.
But that’s probably besides the point, if they can scare a developer into doing what they say anyway.
Speaking of “what’s the point,” I wonder if they’ll send takedown notices to each of the hundreds of people that has forked the dev’s GitHub repo.
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Some law firm is getting lots of overtime. 
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What is "it"? I didn't mention any specific alternatives. It's just the nature of devices made like this. The only choices I see are to deal with it, find something else that works (smart plug? a competing product?), or try to convince the manufacturer to change their mind while we do one of the first two.
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It's better to be healthy and wealthy than to be sick and poor
If there is an option to prefer another vendor or product, it's the way to go. But with Haier, for example, it is not always possible.
I imagine how a conversation with my wife, "It's a great house, and I see you like it, but we won't gonna buy it because the heat pump there is Haier," will end.
Same thing happened recently in the US with Chamberlain MyIQ garage door openers. To use a very US parlance, Chamberlain took a big old gun, pointed it right at it's preverbal foot, and fired repeatedly.
I can't imagine a less affected community of users. All they did was push people like myself to finally stop being lazy and solder in a relay that is much more reliable than MyQ ever was. I'm grateful to them for their greed.
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I think there are plenty of existing products for it, like GoControl, Ecolink, Nexx, and others?
Or (more likely) an integration which they could collect a subscription fee on.
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This isn’t going to end well for Haier, it’s a really bad PR move, and will more than likely lead to losses either way, hard to say how significant those will be.
The developer can get more legal support for free (if they want to) then Haier can shell out, if they choose to fight it.
What makes this very interesting is the lengthy open source attribution list in the Haier SmartHQ app used for GE Appliances (we have several):
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But they were helping them make money....
To my mind, so was the HA integration, which was a factor in our buy decision. In fact, before buying appliances and fixtures for our home, I look to see which of them have Hubitat or HA integrations.
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This guy seems to conflate home assistant with local control of all smart home devices. Obviously some integrations are cloud-based, like this one, which is true whether one is discussing Home Assistant, Hubitat, or any hub.
It makes no sense to suggest that by buying an a/c (or a car in the Mazda case he also references), one also buys the right to use the manufacturer’s cloud service forever without terms.
Should Haier come after the developer that makes it possible to interact with their cloud API (assuming he didn’t literally steal the information necessary to do it)? Of course not.
They’re certainly entitled to try to stop customers with their a/c’s from using unofficial integrations with their cloud, though.
ETA: the better solution for consumers is of course to buy an hvac system with smart controls that are completely local.
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Really? Who gave them that entitlement? Now, if we are talking about ability, that's a different ball of wax.
Presumably anyone who made the purchase of the whatever-it-is, with a cloud-based service with terms that say “you as the user of this cloud based service agree not to circumvent it with unofficial methods of access.”
I don’t like the idea of that anymore than you do. So I avoid products that can exert that kind of control over me and my home.
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Inclusion of F/OSS components don’t require them to not do what they are doing.
Most of the ones shared right there are MIT and BSD too.
The fact they attribute and more than likely aren’t violating those licenses actually supports Haier in enforcing their own license(s).
Note how the letter only references protecting their IP and Terms of Service violations, not license violations.
F/OSS is everywhere these days, even in the most walled off restricted systems out there.
I’m not defending Haier, I stand by my previous comments.
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