Rboy apps - Port to Hubitat

What, no IDE? Horrors!! :innocent:

7 Likes

One of the handful of reasons I jumped ship and came here. :smiley:

2 Likes

Will be interesting to see how that goes. One of (if not THE) largest complaint on Vera was "getting nickled and dimed to death" by their stupid user app store.

I guess we'll see how it goes. I get the need, just worried about the unintended consequences.

Everyone should quickly go fork all gits they like to use (if they haven't already). :wink:

4 Likes

Or HomeSeer... Yeah I agree with you. Certainly see reasons why though. Hope this helps some devs get more easily compensated for their hard work and time.

1 Like

Yeah, when I said Vera I was actually thinking Homeseer. Lol. I wasn't thinking clearly this morning.

But whatever. There are pros and cons. I get it. Hopefully everyone won't pull all their apps/drivers and stick them behind a paywall. It's their right to do so, of course, but it squashes community involvement/sharing.

On the pro side it would encourage some apps/drivers that otherwise wouldn't get released at all.

Pro/con.

3 Likes

Depends on where the company wants to go I guess... will be interesting for sure. Sadly the reality of what I want and what is the best for the survival of HE are probably different things. The trick will be to balance what they have in this awesome community against necessary growth and maturation process as a company...

1 Like

Ha, let me guess: open source and free. :upside_down_face:

4 Likes

Honestly, who doesn't want that?!!

More seriously, I agree with your perspective that open sourcing built-in drivers (and apps) is a support nightmare. It is not a good idea.

I don't know how you plan to maintain your app/driver storefront (for 3rd party developers). But I hope the purchase price includes a description of the level of support the end-user can anticipate from the 3rd party developer.

More than "nickel and diming" for device support, a failure to meet expectations was a big issue with the old HomeSeer model. Things have changed over there a bit.

1 Like

Well, I suppose if Joe wants to sell his whiz-bang weather driver for $10 and offers no support for it, the market will sort that out. Definitely would need a reviews mechanism. Hubitat would stay pretty much hands-off beyond some basic sanity check.

5 Likes

How is it going to work when users put drivers on the app that they charge for, then Hubitat makes in-box drivers for the same device months later?

That's happened a BUNCH of times in the past few years. As the user drivers were free it was a "so what" In the future, though, Hubitat will be taking sales/money away from those devs - so not really a "so what" any more...

And since Hubitat doesn't give roadmaps on what is upcoming, how is a dev supposed to know if their driver will be supplanted by an in-box one in the next release, thereby effectively de-monetizing it?

It's ok if there are no answers to this now, as there is no store. But I think many developers will expect answers to those questions when there is a store.

Not at all.. :wink: - I already use those.

How would you answer this?

I think it's pretty obvious that we will keep pushing the hub forward. Suppose HubConnect was in the store, and we come out with Hub Mesh? I remember when @Cobra would have some feature in one of his apps, and then RM would get a similar feature not long after (not from having been copied, but because users wanted it). Or, suppose you paid $10 for HubConnect, and a week later Hub Mesh comes out for free. That's life!

BTW, no one says you have to charge for an app/driver.

6 Likes

Glad you asked. I would reassure devs that are interested in monetizing their work that their investment in your platform is protected by providing roadmaps.

Personality I think that you owe that to them if you are going to provide a monetization platform.

Just my opinion though.

1 Like

I seriously doubt that roadmap will happen in the foreseeable future. We move much too fast for a roadmap to make sense for us. Things just happen spontaneously quite often, and we don't want to lose that just to make devs feel better about what they do. For example, the new app in beta called Basic Rules was conceived of and came into existence less than a week ago.

The motivation for an app/driver store is first for our users, and second for the devs. So I think you misstate the motivation as being to "provide a monetization platform".

If "owing" a roadmap to the devs by offering a store is part of the equation, then it makes no sense to offer a store. We aren't going to tie our hands, or conform to 'big company' approach to 'roadmap'. We'd rather just keep running forward.

You know, our one attempt at showing our roadmap blew up in our face: Hub Protection Service (now in beta). We've had people claiming false advertising, etc. etc. It turned out that we were simply wrong about some of the obstacles we would have to overcome. Once burned...

So, roadmap is out, categorically. And notice that what I said was "We have in the works (no date yet) an app/driver store". By that you should read that it might be in a month, or it might be years in the future, or it might never happen for some reason. We have a number of things "in the works" that have been there for years, and still aren't front burner, although we get closer to realizing them.... Hub Mesh was one of those things, until it came into existence and was released.

9 Likes

No worries. I understand your position. I don't fully agree with it as I think the equation (and obligations on Hubitat's part) change once a For Pay system is implemented, but my approval wasn't one of the design parameters. :slight_smile:

Hopefully it will be a good thing for the majority when it happens. :+1:

1 Like

Well, it will be an "obligation" free zone from the outset. :grinning:

1 Like

Nice dodge. :wink:

(Seriously, that was a joke. I'm in a smart arse mood)

A store should be good for the majority. Will be interesting what it brings to the ecosystem in the future!

3 Likes

Having read some of the other replies, I have one fundamental question about the app/driver store. While I totally wish for Hubitat to be a successful company for my lifetime and beyond, I also like that by being cloud-independent, I would have the life of my hardware (plus any backup hardware purchased on the resale market) without having to rework my home if unfortunate events were to make Hubitat go away.

I can't really see it, but is there any thought on how a licensed user of a store app/driver could have the ability to move that app/driver to a new hub (from a backup since it would likely be a hardware failure replacement) without either the source code (like current user app/drivers) or access to the Hubitat store?

Ah, you're way ahead of us. Not a clue as to such details... And, as odd as it may seem, we don't really put much energy into thinking about what would happen if we weren't in business. Would you?

13 Likes

Not at all unless it impacts the sales in an app/driver shop and those sales become a key source of company income.