Thank you. That is precisely why I have already contacted both Athom and LG and asked them to explain what personal data relating to me was shared, how it was shared, for what purpose and on what legal basis, and why I was not informed in advance.
I am currently waiting for their responses. I do not want to conclude that a GDPR breach occurred before all the facts are established, but I do expect both companies to provide a complete and transparent explanation.
Update: Since I did not receive a response to the inquiry I submitted through the LG ThinQ app, I contacted LG Electronics Korea by phone yesterday and raised the same issue again.
I asked LG to remove my app from ThinQ PLAY until all the circumstances surrounding its distribution have been fully clarified. I was told that the development team is currently reviewing my inquiry and that LG would provide me with an interim update by Wednesday, September 2 (Korea Standard Time).
I have just checked ThinQ PLAY and confirmed that my app is no longer listed. Although I have not yet received direct confirmation from LG, it appears that my request to remove the app has been acted upon.
When I publish an app, I publish to the Homey app store. I have an (implicit) contract with Athom for this, and one of the things that is very important to me is that Athom is (was?) a company that takes user privacy seriously.
LG does not: it collects user data and sells that data for profit.
I don’t have an (implicit) contract with LG. I don’t publish to ThinQ PLAY. I don’t want my apps to be used in an ecosystem that is, could be, or will be, used to collect user data.
If Athom is going to use an all-or-nothing approach on this, I want my apps to be removed from the Homey app store and any other distribution platform owned or managed by Athom and/or LG, and I also want them removed from any LG devices that might already be running them.
This explanation is difficult to accept for several clear reasons.
If LG ThinQ is truly part of the Homey ecosystem, LG ThinQ ON should be officially supported and registered in the Homey app. Furthermore, for them to be considered the same ecosystem under different names, ThinQ Play and the Homey App Store would need to offer an identical catalog of apps with full cross-installation support.
However, the current reality is quite different:
Claiming that these platforms share the same unified ecosystem while lacking official device integration, app parity, and basic technical support is simply unconvincing.
Update: LG has sent an interim reply
I got an interim reply from LG about the questions I raised earlier.
I had asked LG to confirm six things:
LG said that points 1 and 2 need legal review and may take longer, so I’ll share those once they come in. For points 3 to 6, I could only find partial answers to 3 and 4. Oddly, the reply also included a blocking timestamp that I never asked about.
Here is what LG’s reply did confirm:
So my app had been listed in ThinQ Play for roughly eight months, with version updates syncing the whole time, and this is the first I’m hearing of it.
There’s also a timeline problem I can’t explain. I submitted the app for review on 31 December 2025 (KST), and it only went live on the Homey App Store on 6 January 2026 (KST). Yet LG says my app was already being offered in ThinQ Play from 31 December 2025, which is the day I submitted it for review, and about a week before it was actually public. So how it was picked up and offered starting from the submission date, before it ever went live, is another open question.
Evidence of the review submission date (31 December 2025, KST) and the live date (6 January 2026, KST):
This reply mostly describes the current state, like the block time, the first offering date, the version and the install count. The core of what I originally asked, which is on what basis my app ended up in ThinQ Play, still hasn’t been explained.
LG described it as “Homey Store ecosystem integration” and “Public Attribution”. That explains how the app was surfaced, but it doesn’t establish any contractual or copyright basis for treating my decision to publish on the Homey App Store as consent to distribute the app on ThinQ Play and ThinQ ON.
So I’ve asked LG to confirm the following in writing:
I also wanted to clear up two things.
First, I never asked LG to fully block my app in ThinQ Play. I asked them to temporarily pause new installs until the background and the permissions are confirmed. How to handle it after that was something I wanted to discuss once the facts were clear.
Second, my app was never built or offered for one specific platform. I just published it following the Homey App Store’s normal policies and process, and I never limited it to Homey Pro or any particular hardware. But that doesn’t mean I agreed to have it offered on some other platform I was never told about. Where an app gets published, and who it’s offered to, is something a developer should be told about and be able to choose up front.
For now this is still very much a fact-finding stage. I haven’t received a real answer yet on the distribution rights or the basis for consent. I’ve asked LG to tell me which team is handling the remaining items and roughly when I can expect a full reply.
For reference, I’m attaching my original inquiry and LG’s reply in Korean below.
I’ll post more as I hear back from both Athom and LG.
What really bothers me personally about all of this is that when Atom was acquired by LG, this discussion had already come up once before. Back then, however, Atom solemnly promised us that no community knowledge or development would be diverted toward LQ. And that is exactly what has happened now.
Sure, there are reasons why developers might support this move (e.g., because their devices are also sold in Korea, etc.). BUT PLEASE NOT LIKE THIS. Just following the logic: “They can’t read those ‘weird’ characters anyway, so let’s just do it.”
It would have been so simple to let us know in advance and say: “Hey folks, we want to give you the option to offer your community app on the ThinQ PLAY platform via opt-in.” Then every developer could have decided for themselves whether they wanted to do it or not.
P.S.: What else hasn’t been resolved, in my opinion? Who’s going to handle all the support for each app? And will a ThinQ PLAY platform be made available to us for testing, or do we have to buy one ourselves as well? Because every developer who’s already built more than one “Hello World” or “To-Do List” app has had the painful experience of realizing that claims like “the system is 100% compatible” or “no problem, it works” just aren’t true.
As long as all of this (including the GDPR) isn’t settled, I don’t want to see any of my apps on a platform other than Athom/Homey.
By the way: LQ has been on my personal blacklist for years.
I agree with your point. I was also upset about the issues you mentioned, which is exactly why I raised this concern in the first place.
However, even if you did not mean it in a derogatory way, as a Korean, I found your reference to the Korean language as “weird characters” quite offensive.
I didn’t mean to be dismissive, but as a “regular” European, you just don’t learn the Korean writing system in school. Or can you, for example, read Egyptian hieroglyphs?
The issue I’m raising isn’t that you can’t read Korean. It’s that you chose to describe a writing system from another culture that you can’t read as “weird characters.”
I do think this is an important issue, but there are bigger matters to focus on here, so I’ll leave it at that.
Hi guys, as @meerlol mentioned, we’re currently looking into this.
In the meantime, you can already find some additional information about this in the email you received in September 2024 regarding our updated Terms of Use.
Also good to mention here that we greatly value the community, and it’s definitely not our intention to make any of you feel this way.
Thanks for sharing this. This is relevant, and I agree that it shows Athom gave a general notice in 2024 that Homey apps could also work on third-party products embedding Homey software. I therefore would not claim that there was absolutely no notice of any third-party expansion.
However, this summary still does not explain what happened with ThinQ Play.
The wording says that Homey apps “can now also work” on third-party products and that developers “can reach more customers” there. It does not say that existing community apps will automatically be included by default, without an app-specific opt-in or opt-out choice.
The notice also does not mention:
The exact wording of the Terms of Use that became effective on 15 October 2024 is therefore important. I have asked for the specific name, version and clause that Athom and LG believe authorised my app to be offered through ThinQ Play, as well as the record showing how and when those terms became binding on me as a developer.
There is also an inconsistency that still needs to be explained. Athom recently said:
Athom also said that this direction was not clearly written down anywhere and needed to be corrected. If the 2024 notice and terms were already considered sufficient disclosure for automatic distribution through ThinQ Play, I would like Athom to explain how that position can be reconciled with its current response.
My app’s timeline raises a separate question. I submitted it for review on 31 December 2025 KST, and it only went live on the Homey App Store on 6 January 2026 KST. LG nevertheless says it had been offered in ThinQ Play since 31 December 2025. Even if the 2024 terms covered third-party products in general, they do not explain how an app could be picked up and offered from its review-submission date, before it was publicly live.
So this 2024 notice is relevant, but it does not by itself answer the questions about automatic inclusion, the actual scope of the licence, the pre-publication timeline, developer choice, support responsibilities, testing access or data processing. Those are the points I am still asking Athom and LG to clarify in writing.
Just like in the Homey App Store it will show the date on which you’ve submitted the app, as that is the date is is available in test
I can’t find anything in the Terms of Use that states anything about my software running on products other than those developed by Athom. Which article should I be looking at?
Currently the relevant section is §1.2, which was adjusted back in September 2024;
1.2 In addition, these Terms of Use also apply to Products, such as Athom’s Product ‘Homey’, (“Homey”) and other products, that can access Services (“Products”).
But where does it say that by using “Products” I agree to my apps being redistributed?
The Terms of Use read like an end user agreement anyway. They don’t even, for example, grant Athom a right to redistribute my software, which seems to be one of the more fundamental things that the ToU should handle if they also apply to publishing apps to the Homey ecosystem.
What do you mean by that? What do you have you to “look into”? Did it all happen accidently and took you by surprise? Like a bug or so?
We’re getting far off topic, but it would be great if Homey can create default - and maybe mandated - privacy policy screens for apps.
I don’t think Sven is intentionally breaking the GDPR, (he almost certainty is unknowingly) but I would not have installed his apps knowing this. Thankfully my DNS seems to block his IP tracking service, so not much harm for me personally.
As this drifts from the Issue the Topic Starter addresses,
I Split from the point above to a new Topic: Collecting user data in Homey (Community) Apps
Lets try to keep the two issues / Topics separate.
