Hey @Doekse
Can you offer everyone an update please on the Reolink integration that was announced, please?
You’ve been in the “negotiation” stage with Reolink for over a year now and a lot of people are waiting and counting on some progress.
I’ve paused any further home security upgrades until I can get some clarity on whether this is going to happen.
Hey! I think there’s been a bit of confusion. Homey never officially announced a partnership with Reolink. We only mentioned that we’re in touch with their team, which is why the status was set to “negotiating”.
Since we haven’t heard from them in a while, I’ll update the status to “Waiting on manufacturer” to make that clearer. Appreciate the feedback!
No confusion here.
Merely asked for an update on something you let the community know about over a year ago.
I think to save confusion moving forward, don’t bother saying anything until you know for certain that the integration is going forward.
How can you say that you are in negotiation, if the other party hasn’t responded for “some time”
Surely there should be some processes in place to manage customer expectations?
Any update @Doekse please?
Hey @Doekse any update please?
50+ comments on the partnership ‘announcement’ page.
It’s really frustrating that this is what passes for official communication between Athom and it’s customers.
Hey, appreciate you checking in! No updates just yet; if there were, I’d have shared them already. Like I mention in other threads, I always post updates as soon as there’s news, so I kindly ask to keep the “Any updates?” posts to a minimum. It helps keep my inbox manageable and makes sure I can focus on getting actual updates to you guys faster 
Totally understand how frustrating it is that your Reolink devices aren’t working with Homey right now. And hey, if you’ve got thoughts on how I should handle updates (or even non-updates like this), I’m all ears! Just not much new to share at the moment.
That said, one thing worth noting: Reolink recently became an official Home Assistant partner and seems to be opening up a bit more with their APIs. Hopefully, that’s a good sign for us too!
Six months later and not a single update about said “negotiations”
We’ve been in contact with the Reolink team, and they’ve expressed strong interest in integrating with the Homey platform. For now, they’re waiting on camera stream support to be finalized, so there aren’t any concrete updates yet. These things take time, but stay tuned!
So I’ve just found out from other threads that Homey has had a working proof of concept regarding camera streams for getting close to six months now.
This is really great news and I can’t wait to see what you have in store. However, it’s now pretty obvious that Reolink must have been waiting quite a while for this to be finished off, before they commit to creating an official app.
For a long time now, you’ve kept up this weird kind of smoke and mirrors act that in fact it’s Athom that has been waiting for Reolink to get behind the table. It’s just comical to watch.
I can understand that these things take time and that partnerships are delicate to develop and nurture. In respect of this, would it not make more sense for the partnerships manager to simply focus on securing and developing partnerships, rather than being the consumer facing narrative of how everything is communicated with Homey users?
All of this stuff should just be left to the marketing and customer support department to communicate news in a clear and transparent fashion, when it is appropriate to do so.
With respect, the current way things are communicated to the forum, is so frustrating.
I totally understand the frustration, it really does take time to get these things moving. As Partnerships Manager, my full focus is on bringing these partners onto the platform, and I want to be transparent with you about how things are (or aren’t) progressing.
The reality is that it’s not as simple as telling Reolink: “Build an integration and be happy with it.” These partnerships only work if they’re mutually beneficial, for the brand, for us, and for you as the end users.
Sometimes it’s a quick “let’s just do it” from a brand, but other times it has to go through multiple layers of approval before a decision can be made. That’s just the nature of working with large companies.
I didn’t need a stock Chat GPT response, what I needed was some acceptance that your messaging has been inconsistent, inaccurate and that you’ll review the internal processes around ‘announcing’ partnerships.
In my view, partnerships should not even be announced as in the ‘negotiating’ stage. They should only be announced when an app is in active development and there is a clear and plausible roadmap for delivery to consumers.
Anything short of that is nothing more than rumour and speculation and to consumers looks to be being used (either by design or by incompetence) to lure in new customers on the promise of new features.
That is really, really poor customer service from a company that I generally hold in high regard in many other areas.
Just like I said,
Athom weren’t waiting for Reolink at all.
Reolink were waiting for Athom to produce the functionality.
Wow. What an impolite post. Personally I’m very happy with the posts from @Doekse as ot shows they are dong their best to get things going with Reolink. Like to short ans friendly updates.
On the other hand, announcements like this create expectations that may never get met. It wouldn’t be the first time that it’s being announced that “we’re working with $PARTY to create an official app”, only to never materialise.
I can imagine that lots of companies are only interested in providing information, not in making an actual Homey app. That’s how the Reolink integration for Home Assistant came about: a community member started with whatever information was available publicly, then Reolink became involved by providing the developer with more information and devices, and everyone was happy.
I find it difficult to believe that Reolink is unwilling, or dragging their feet, to provide this information to Athom as well, unless Athom is requiring (or at least pushing towards) Reolink to develop their own Homey app. If that’s the case, I’m not surprised that this takes a lot of time, as this would be quite costly for Reolink (requiring at least one developer to learn how to develop Homey apps, then maintaining it and handling issues, feedback, requests, etc), without obvious benefits (you might say that it could boost sales of Reolink devices, but Reolink are one of the few brands that make decent devices that don’t require cloud access or subscriptions, and I think that a lot of people are interested in their products even without Homey support).
We don’t know why it’s taking “multiple layers of approval” for Reolink to come to a decision, because we’re only getting a one-sided story, which is another issue with these statements: if a partnership doesn’t materialise (or, as with Tuya, goes sour), we only hear Athom’s side of the story, and they (obviously) always put the blame on the other party.
Also, let’s not forget that Athom is owned by LG now, which make products that directly compete with Reolink products.
Never knew, which ones to be exact? 
To elaborate on the rest; the integration is already well on it’s way. With Reolink they really wanted to handle development of the integration themselves, but in the end it was difficult to free up internal resources to kick off development. That’s why we proposed to take on development through one of our agencies 
Reolink probably doesn’t see them as competition, judging from the website
It is very impolite you are absolutely right. It’s a direct result of seriously poor customer relations and communication.
”We are in negotiation”, not even active negotiation.
It means absolutely nothing.
