A few years ago, Paul Wieland, a 44-year-old information technology professional living in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, was wrapping up a home renovation when he ran into a hiccup. He wanted to be able to control his new garage door with his smartphone. But the options available, including a product called MyQ, required connecting to a company’s internet servers.
He believed a “smart” garage door should operate only over a local Wi-Fi network to protect a home’s privacy, so he started building his own system to plug into his garage door. By 2022, he had developed a prototype, which he named RATGDO, for Rage Against the Garage Door Opener.
He had hoped to sell 100 of his new gadgets just to recoup expenses, but he ended up selling tens of thousands. That’s because MyQ’s maker did what a number of other consumer device manufacturers have done over the last few years, much to the frustration of their customers: It changed the device, making it both less useful and more expensive to operate.
Chamberlain Group, a company that makes garage door openers, had created the MyQ hubs so that virtually any garage door opener could be controlled with home automation software from Apple, Google, Nest and others. Chamberlain also offered a free MyQ smartphone app.
Two years ago, Chamberlain started shutting down support for most third-party access to its MyQ servers. The company said it was trying to improve the reliability of its products. But this effectively broke connections that people had set up to work with Apple’s Home app or Google’s Home app, among others. Chamberlain also started working with partners that charge subscriptions for their services, though a basic app to control garage doors was still free.
While Mr. Wieland said RATGDO sales spiked after Chamberlain made those changes, he believes the popularity of his device is about more than just opening and closing a garage. It stems from widespread frustration with companies that sell internet-connected hardware that they eventually change or use to nickel-and-dime customers with subscription fees.
“You should own the hardware, and there is a line there that a lot of companies are experimenting with,” Mr. Wieland said in a recent interview. “I’m really afraid for the future that consumers are going to swallow this and that’s going to become the norm.”
Too often, we are losing control of our personal technology, and the list of examples keeps growing. BMW made headlines in 2022 when it began charging subscriptions to use heated seats in some cars — a decision it reversed after a backlash. In 2021, Oura, the maker of a $350 sleep-tracking device, angered customers when it began charging a $6 monthly fee for users to get deeper analysis of their sleep. (Oura is still charging the fee.)
For years, some printer companies have required consumers to buy proprietary ink cartridges, but more recently they began employing more aggressive tactics, like remotely bricking a printer when a payment is missed for an ink subscription.
The activists and tinkerers rebelling against superfluous hardware subscriptions and fighting for device ownership are part of the broader “right to repair” movement, a consumer advocacy campaign that has focused on passing laws nationwide that require tech and appliance manufacturers to provide the tools, instructions and parts necessary for anyone to fix products, from smartphones to refrigerators.
I bought a RATGDO a few months ago for different reasons. Last summer, as I walked out my front door, I confronted something deeply unsettling: My garage had been left open overnight. As a new parent, I figured that forgetting to close the garage door could be chalked up to “dad brain.”
But days later, when I tried to use the MyQ smartphone app, the software showed an error message and failed to close the garage door. Days later, it happened again. The glitchy app, I suspected, was the culprit that left my home vulnerable.
My frustrations led to a web search on workarounds. On Reddit and other forums, scores of dissatisfied MyQ users sang praise for RATGDO. It looked like something cobbled together with parts from a RadioShack: a utilitarian computer housed in a piece of blue plastic, along with some electrical wires.
Skeptical but desperate, I paid $62 for RATGDO. After spending 45 minutes setting it up — a somewhat complicated process that involved plugging the miniature computer into my laptop to install its software from a website and then connecting its electrical wires to my garage door opener — I felt strangely euphoric. The gadget worked well and let me control the garage using Apple’s Home app, eliminating the need to use MyQ.
A Chamberlain spokeswoman said customers could still use the MyQ app to control their garage doors for free and that the service worked with other third-party partners such as Ring, Vivint and Alarm.com to provide a seamless and secure experience. She added that the partnerships served the vast majority of the company’s 14 million MyQ users.
As for the glitches with my garage door failure to close, Chamberlain said the garage door’s sensors might have been blocked or my Wi-Fi connection was down, but I had already confirmed that was not the case.
The issue with companies that alter their internet-connected devices after consumers have already purchased the hardware remains largely unaddressed — in part because corporations are taking advantage of dated copyright laws, consumer advocacy groups say.
In a perfect world, consumers would be able to load whatever software they wanted onto the hardware they owned. But the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, introduced in the 1990s to combat content piracy, made it potentially criminal to circumvent digital locks that companies embed into copyrighted software. That’s why we generally don’t see tinkerers publish tools that remove subscription requirements from heated car seats, sleep-tracking devices and printers, said Nathan Proctor, a director at U.S. PIRG, a consumer advocacy nonprofit.
(The RATGDO, which involves physically wiring a computer running open-source software to a garage door opener, does not involve circumventing a digital lock.)
“They want people to pay for using zeros and ones,” Mr. Proctor said. “There’s a fight over whether the economy is going to function that way. What are the limits? ‘Oh, you want to turn on your headlights? I’m sorry, you don’t have the headlight package.’”
This fight with a garage door opener company also raises another important question: If companies can modify their internet-connected products however they want after consumers have purchased them, what does it mean to even own anything anymore?
With that in mind, Kevin O’Reilly, the executive director of the FULU Foundation (it’s an acronym for Freedom from Unethical Limitations on Users), a nonprofit that fights for consumer ownership of devices, runs a bounty program that involves awarding money to people who can restore functionality to devices that have been bricked by manufacturers.
This year, Google, for example, discontinued support for its first- and second-generation Nest, a thermostat that automatically sets the temperature based on a user’s schedule. An ambitious coder who published open-source software for users to get the defunct thermostats working again was rewarded with a FULU bounty of nearly $15,000.
“Being able to use the stuff we bought has always been a part of an agreement between consumers and vendors,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “This is something that is touching more people.”
So what to do?
There’s no easy solution since so many of our devices are internet-connected and thus controlled by their makers. But Kyle Wiens, the chief executive of iFixit, a company that sells repair parts, offered this rule of thumb: Always opt for the “dumb” devices — the refrigerators, dishwashers, exercise bikes and coffee makers that lack a Wi-Fi connection or screen.
“That smart fridge would make your life worse in every way,” Mr. Wiens said.
For Mr. Wieland, the fight isn’t over. He started a company named RATCLOUD, for Rage Against the Cloud. He said he was developing similar products that were not yet for sale.
Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer for The Times. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use.
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