Hey all,
I’m very sorry to see that this has gone wrong so badly. Let me explain the situation and our solution.
Foscam has been in contact with us about publishing an official app for their products. This is usually great news for both Athom as a company and users. Firstly, users get a front-row experience, on par with an iOS & Android app of the manufacturer. That’s also where we see Homey, as an equally important platform for smart home products.
When a manufacturer maintains their own Homey app, and many already do, they can release quicker updates, provide better support and add support for new products on launch day.
From a business perspective, when a manufacturer develops their own app, it makes Homey a much more stable platform. Sometimes community developers leave and abandon their apps. Sometimes because they leave, and sometimes because they’re angry at us.
This is either way bad for users, of course. Companies, on the other hand, cannot simply drop support without a lot of damage. So when we have the choice between a company or a community developer, we choose for a company most of the time, because in the end it’s absolutely better for everyone.
Sometimes a company wants to replace an app. This was the case with Foscam, because there was already a (great!) app developed by Edwin. They even told us they were impressed by his app, but still they wanted to make their own version.
In some case, companies also pay community developers to publish under the brand’s name. We love that that happens because it means someone’s hobby just became profitable, and companies don’t have to develop in-house. In this case, Foscam was not interested in that we heard.
During this process we notified Edwin, thanked him a lot for his contribution and explained the situation. We also gave him a generous Homey Store gift card as a token of appreciation. In my personal opinion, I would’ve been damn proud if a company saw my success and wanted to adopt it. But it seemed that doesn’t account for everyone and that was our mistake.
Then we made two big mistakes. The first was to unpublish Edwin’s app before Foscam’s app was live. This should have never happened and we will make sure this won’t ever happen again.
Secondly, we found out afterwards that Foscam didn’t develop their own app! While Foscam promised us they’d develop their own app, in fact they copied most of Edwin’s code, which was against his app’s license. We missed this during the review process, and that’s unforgivable.
For now we will restore Edwin’s app, and have a very tough conversation with Foscam. I really do believe that for the long-run it’s better when companies support their own products, but that should always happen in an honest and transparent way.
Thank you for your devotion everyone. It’s not always easy making right decisions, but we’re learning.
Emile
