To get away from HA for the moment, the questions that remain for me are:
- It is looking like the line between a free tier and an individual subscription is being drawn around the use of non-commercial API Access apps. Issues arising from that are:
- Is there any leeway for limited usage to evaluate apps without triggering a subscription?
- Have I actually missed the point in asking the previous question? Do users logging in to API Access apps need a subscription or is it just the owners of the apps?
- API Access apps have been encouraged for use in place of 24-hour PATs even for first-party app use, whereas the intended target of subscription seems to be third-party services. What’s the deal there?
- An alternative to API Access apps for first-party use has always been Webhook and Lambda SmartApps. However the latest developer documentation has seen them go from being one of the best documented areas of SmartThings to oblivion. It is hard to take that as a good sign. Are we to pretend they never existed? [See also …]
- What is the future of PATs given only the sheer inconvenience of updating them manually everyday is an obstacle to their deprecated use in third-party apps, which is clearly intended to be the remit of API Access? It is trivially easy to create renewable OAuth tokens for use in application development so all that is really left is their use with ‘user’ endpoints and the AWA and CLI could easily take that over, especially if they allowed for arbitrary API calls. [See also …]
- I still feel that the idea of individual subscriptions is incompatible with real world SmartThings usage where the use of multiple accounts by the same individual can be highly desirable. For example, if you have multiple Locations that you want to link individually to third-party services you are best served using multiple accounts with access to one Location each. As a second example, if you are developing an API Access app how do you usefully test the ‘login’ without having multiple accounts?
I know I mentioned most of that only three weeks ago, but it seems much longer.