1. United States
2. Wash.
3. Letter

Consumers have the right to use their purchased items how they please, this has been true for many industries for many years and it’s time we expand it. Much like car manufacturers have to publish manuals, smart home companies should have to publish their API specs. If companies start publishing these it allows customers to understand and leverage these devices in ways they prefer. This topic is muddled and unclear to most people, but as a software engineer I understand it quite well. This main issue stems from companies wanting to force you into their cloud ecosystem and/or app so they can harvest data to provide you with smart features. While they should be allowed to do so under their user agreements they should also be forced to publish how to interact with their API along with the user agreement. With this knowledge customers such as myself can buy the devices we want and enable them in any smart home provider, this is currently handled through things like Home Assistant and HomeBridge, but in the current state you must do lots of trial and error as the companies have not published their API spec. This leads to devs having to intercept and guess at what values to do what for an API, where publishing the spec wouldn’t further compromise any security concerns but enable customers to better use the devices they paid for.