no one has time for it

you bought the device you should own it

it's not even anything fancy where you could argue that continuous software updated need to be done or similar

also pass a law that all smart home devices had to go through a hub, no direct internet connection allowed, uh put it under "reducing DDOS potential due to long term issues with internet connected smart home device security"

https://www.grainger.com/product/LIFTMASTER-Commercial-Door-...

Reading this is the first I've learned about ads in the app (sure enough, I looked and they are there now). This annoys me greatly as if the device bought and paid for isn't enough, so now they get to serve up ads...

Are the device brand that are more adequate for Home Assistant?

I have a meross garage door opener that uses homelink (a standard that virtually ever garage door opener supports) to open/close the garage door with a sensor on the top of the door to detect when it's open and closed. It was $49. That's cheaper than myQ addons for chamberlain. It works with google home, ifttt and home assistant. (I have reminders set if the door is open for more than X minutes and if it is still open after a certain time of day).

Having to have "yet another app" (myQ) installed just to use a garage door is pretty ridiculous - if you're a power user you should understand the folly of using unofficial integrations and as an unofficial integration provider you should know you're walking on ice.

A garage door opener can be activated from the inside with a momentary pushbutton switch. It should be trivially easy to have a Raspberry Pi or similar wired in parallel, and have that running some code to enable remote operation by an app or service.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326

Having done some research into Chamberlain's products, I don't recommend anyone to use them if they have the choice.

I don't know what such a mandate would look like. I just know that we're at least a decade behind where we should be because the market isn't getting it done.

A quick Google search shows there were approximately 144 million homes in the US. Do wifi door openers really have 1% total home penetration?

More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38186303

In our current system I see two ways to try to make this reality: 1) economic factors and 2) regulation. 1) will not happen, because the data is worth enough to big players that a small competitor can not compete on the hardware/software/service margins alone. You need to become as big and integrated as the current players to be able to offer similar features and prices. Sure, it is more choice, but the option is just as bad.

2) will not happen due to regulatory capture problems as I already stated. A big player can shoulder the burden of compliance easier than a small shop. Maybe, just maybe, there is hope if anti-trust actions split up the existing big players, but I am not holding my breath.

The third way, one small group of indomitable Gauls^Wnerds still holds out against the invaders, is what we currently have and what offers a little bit of hope to me. But I fear this will never become the norm.

Just one of the most awful customer hostile products I've ever wasted money on.

I just clicked ratgdo's buy link to support the nice, well-documented open-source [3] project. In truth though I have the right hardware sitting around here already, so I might just use that depending on how long the "back ordered" status lasts...

[1] There's a Home Assistant integration for the Elk M1 Gold with some Python library; I also have my own WIP Rust library for interacting with it here: <https://github.com/scottlamb/elkm1>

[2] something like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Gebildet-Security-Rolling-Magnetic-Ap...

[3] docs at <https://paulwieland.github.io/ratgdo/> but the actual code is in a separate repo at <https://github.com/ratgdo/esphome-ratgdo>

ratgdo[1] is close.

[1]: https://paulwieland.github.io/ratgdo/

If there's one thing I'm dedicated to now, it's that all of these custom cloud IoT things are transient user hostile junk. If it's not open source and in my control, then it's not mine.

Also I understand one of the reasons this isn’t a standard offering is because garage openers have a hard time not crushing things? Kind of surprised me.

I'm thinking I'll just get a cheap garage door opener remote, solder the trigger pin to the button on the remote, and tape that to the ceiling next to the z-wave controller. Janky, but at least I'll be able to get it functional again to send the command.

Honestly I was always bothered that it used a cloud API at all. The device is right there in my house, on my own wifi. Why should it even phone home if I don't need it to?

I just chucked my MyQ device and replaced it with a Meross MSG100HK--it works perfectly and natively with HomeKit--no cloud service required. Incidentally, the latency is much lower too.

The device is basically a wifi-enabled, USB powered "dry contact" switch. You connect the pigtail in parallel with your existing wired open/close button. There's also a magnetic sensor (similar to what old door alarms used) that goes near the door to verify it has closed.

I have about 20 schedules to close the door lol

That said, I _do_ have an automated gate controller. The installer wanted some insane amount to connect it to wifi. Politely no. An esp32, a couple of relays, some reading in the installation manual about control circuits and a bit of custom code... And now the gate is on local wifi, easily integrated with HA, and nothing opaque about it.

Do garage door openers have the same sort of control circuits?

My solution, after looking into every off-the-shelf option, was to take an esp32 running esp32home + Home Assistant and hot wire it to buttons and status LEDs on a remote + base unit and stick it on the shelf in the garage. It's not pretty, but it works reliably.

I’ve already soldered contacts to a garage door opener to a relay with esphome. That works well, but doesn’t give me as much info as theirs does. I also am at risk of the battery dying.

On a side note, i do love my home assistant, but ANYTHING that has to do with entry into my house is not and will not be automated, garage doors, door locks, etc. However that is my personal paranoia talking.

Aren't there plenty of great stand alone garage door openers that you can wire a smart relay or whatever into?

From what I can see there are plenty of "wifi garage door adaptor" options and everything looks to have pretty standard wiring, it's only not "plug and play" cause it's bare wires rather than plugs but it's essentially the same.

No doubt they want to exploit that data and begin integration with all their shady Real State business [3].

Their new CTO/Executive VP says in one of their PR news: "With Blackstone’s partnership, we will capitalize on new market opportunities". And a Senior Management Director says "...unique opportunity to build on its leadership position at the center of housing and e-commerce megatrends (...) expansion into connected homes, businesses and communities" [4].

Very alarming in times that big owners are trying also to force biometric data collection in their buildings (see Atlantic Plaza Towers) or are blindly giving information to agencies (see Amazon Ring cameras and the likes).

Now, the rant:

Of course, with one hand the CEO is donating to buy his name in institutions: "There is a Stephen Schwarzman building at the New York Public Library, a Schwarzman centre at Yale University and the Schwarzman College of Computing in Massachusetts. Soon, the University of Oxford will open the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, funded by the largest single donation it has ever received." [5] and the other is receiving billions from universities like UC to speculate in real state [6].

One would say it's curious how Schwarzman creates a huge publicity stunt with "biggest single donation 'since the Renaissance'" (£150m) [7], but why would be important to donate to Oxford, when they have almost £8b in endowments... [8]

  1: https://www.blackstone.com/news/press/the-duchossois-group-completes-saleof-chamberlain-group-to-blackstone/
  2: https://www.wsj.com/articles/blackstone-to-buy-chamberlain-group-11631019601
  3: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/26/blackstone-group-accused-global-housing-crisis-un
  4: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chamberlain-group-adds-top-tech-leader-dan-phillips-as-cto-to-accelerate-companys-technology-transformation-301744538.html
  5: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/29/blackstone-rebellion-how-one-country-worlds-biggest-commercial-landlord-denmark
  6: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-01-20/university-california-blackstone-real-estate-fund-housing-prices
  7: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jun/19/oxford-receive-biggest-single-donation-stephen-schwarzman
  8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_endowment#Endowments_over_%C2%A31_billion

> Buy products that work locally and won’t stop functioning when management wants an additional revenue stream.

If only there was a LOCAL way. But I can't poll the device locally. I can't send it commands.

> Our customers rely on us to make access simple without sacrificing quality and reliability. Unauthorized app integrations, stemming from only 0.2% of myQ users, previously accounted for more than half of the traffic to and from the myQ system, and at times constituted a substantial DDOS event that consumed high quantities of resources.

Yeah, that sounds plausible, because:

- Home Assistant users are power users, thus more likely to actually use the devices in question;

- Official IoT software and integrations are uniformly shit, designed to discourage effective use (while maximizing data collection).

Thus, I read this statement as: "We're not happy that some of our customers decided to actually use the 'smart'/'connected' aspects of our product; our service-providing part was not ready to provide the service, and unlike the data collection part, it was never intended to."

I bought a Miku baby monitor specifically because of the 2 devices that offered a feature I wanted, Miku had no subscription fees. And they advertised that they never would. It cost $400.

Then they went bankrupt and during bankruptcy they sent out a proposal to start charging for previously free features. Then they retracted that proposal. Not sure if the judge shut that down, or what happened. But then they sold to a company conveniently created the day of the sale.

Within a month the new company forced out an over the air update that disabled most functionality until you pay them $10 a month (they went bankrupt in the first place because they did a normal over the air firmware update that bricked every single unit and had to replace them all).

Last time I checked they were still being advertised on Amazon as being subscription free.

Honestly I think we need regulation to force companies to purchase a bond to provide basic security and support for any IOT devices they sell for some number of years from the purchase date. I don’t see any sign of the market solving this anytime soon.

Sounds to me like it's about time to publish some 3rd party firmware for the hubs/embedded controllers in the openers. Software developers who tolerate implementing consumer-hostile antipatterns all day long tend to be absolute shit at embedded systems security. At the end of the day it's just a garage door opener. The hardware is based on an FN-Link WiFi IOT module with fairly minimal customization. The door sensor is BLE. This shouldn't be too hard to root.

You don't need anyone's permission or API to control any garage door opener --- smart or dumb. The suggested "ratgo" device is one option but looks kinda overpriced to me.

Every garage door opener has 2 sets of dry contacts. One set controls the open/close function and normally connects to a physical button on the inside wall. This is easily shared with any other device. The other set is a limit switch that tells the motor to stop once the door is open. This too can be easily shared and read.

All that is required for full control is a wifi device with 1 output and 1 input that speaks Home Assistant. Sonoff or some other manufacturer must have an affordable one. If not, maybe I'll make one. It's not that hard with readily available hardware.

"Location" (while using App) and "Notifications". So it can locate you when you trigger it, but it can't track you all the time.

I was not aware of there being ads in it, but I just looked, and you are absolutely right, there is an ad at the top. It looks like its for their home security camera.

Based on my experience with the company, I would not purchase additional products from them. Not based on my desire to use home automation or homekit, just on the fact that the app is poor.

The garage door openers themselves, however, which have battery backup and which open quietly and with a gradual slowing near the finish, are pretty decent. Mainly I wish they had a better, faster app, as the garage door is the smart home thing I used most (followed by maybe Rachio).

If it works for you, that's great. I'm not trying to yuck your yum, just sharing my own personal experiences.

I'm sure this is a solvable and solved problem, but I do believe it is non-trivial, and potentially a major headache for a company to implement just to support a tiny niche of users. I'd be delighted to find out I'm wrong though!

And, unfortunately, the business case isn't there, since this weakens lock-in effects. I don't endorse this reason—that's why I run my own HA instance and don't buy or use any products that require the cloud or otherwise can't be operated entirely locally (including flashing Valetudo to my robot vacuum!).

https://support.nuki.io/hc/en-us/articles/12947926779409-MQT...

Then a few months later I decided to try again and be very careful and deliberate, and ... it worked. Just like it was supposed to. Sigh. No idea what incantation I did right, but now it has been working for several years without a hitch.

I did recently buy a ratgdo (well, ordered it at least, it hasn't arrived). That's my backup plan if the Home Bridge decides to go tits up.

Order of magnitude higher, same point, same result.

I agree it's wiser to avoid such situations but a lot of people end up delegating this kind of responsibility. If enough of them end up burning their own fingers, that could go badly for a provider. Even if frivolous lawsuits weren't a thing, a spate of ignorant but angry social media posts could be very damaging.

Again, I'm not saying I necessarily have a solution or that hardware owners should have hurdles placed in their way. I'm just pointing out that in some ways the provider may be damned in one way if they do and damned in another way if they don't.

I suppose the IoT sub-sector will end up in similar proportions to other, older tech: Some vendors, analogous to e.g., Red Hat or Linode, will specialize in catering to enthusiasts / power-users and have fairly noncommittal / at-your-own-risk / no-warranty license agreements. However, if the past is any indication, most people will end up doing a lot of business in walled-garden analogs of Apple or Facebook.

In fact, after my initial irritation, I thought "at the end of the day, if they made a couple shortcuts available then I could still say <Hey Siri> Open the Garage door" – It's not perfect like homekit but it'll go a long way to placating many of us who don't want to keep launching a separate app.

I buy a connected garage door opener. The provider knows my geolocation, my name, email address, socioeconomic status, even the phone I own. Inferences can be made on activity such as "they leave for work at 7am when garage door opens".

The collection of data doesn't need to be used specifically for reengaging me with Chamberlain. It is now an asset to the company that can be sold to others as outlined in their Information Sharing section. Which basically says "we share it with everyone".

Partners can be anyone from insurance companies to academic researchers. Remember that partners aren't limited to just one data set. They have the ability to ask multiple companies: "What data do you have for all occupants of houses in this geographic area?"

* someone who drives frequently may rank higher for automotive products and services

* use to independently rank other statistics, i.e. someone with kids probably comes and goes more than a single person or non-child-rearing couple. Take the dataset where you know they have kids (and myQ) and see if you can detect the ones with kids using only myQ data (plus other statistics). If it allows you to infer this property accurately enough, profit.

* Someone who comes and goes a lot is most likely not physically disabled, so exclude them from those specific marketing materials.

* someone who is home a lot (hardly ever opens their garage door) might like to spend money on useless gadgets, try selling them IoT toasters

I'd rather that it use the LAN, if I'm there at the time.

Data collection and remote access can just be their own functionality.

Haha, she's got you there.

I guess you started using Home Assistance recently / shortly... and/or you use only a few HA integrations.

Otherwise, you would have already run into enough troubles with updates.

2) Even if the above were not true, at that point you're back to an internet enabled smart home device system, and now we're simply picking which vendor to trust over the other. But in both cases, the option for the vendor to collect telemetry data about your usage of the products exists.

There is really no viable way for the typical consumer to be able to both have a good product experience for something like this, and to prevent a cloud vendor from having access to their data. Unless I'm missing something obvious.

That's true for literally anything, not just IoT security and privacy. I mean, even for highly technical users, one can't do everything from scratch, nor even check and control every single aspect: you gotta trust the the computer hardware or OS you're using isn't backdoored, you gotta trust the people that built the place you live in didn't put half the rebar actually needed or wired the whole thing backwards or with thinner-than-required wires, you gotta trust that the food you eat isn't going to make you sick...

Same for HASS, one could delegate trust to a specialist that would install a HA Green or Yellow box for them, just as they do for electrical wiring. HA is only "third party" because the IoT place lacks standards but is in essence no different than wiring stuff from different vendors, where "myriads of decentralised solutions" exist only because of standards, and for which decentralisation essentially means everyone is a third party to everyone else.

So I don't think dismissing HASS as third party is fair, and wiring IoT with virtual wires is no different than wiring a breaker box. If you don't know how to do it it can be dangerous, and so you delegate and trust someone to do their job properly.

The problem is that approximately NONE of the commercial vendors are in any way trustworthy. They're really pushing hard the degree of abuse they inflict on the customers, and social immunity takes long time to build.

The ultimate solution IMO is to have people trust in people they can actually trust - that is, make the third parties local. A partner, a kid, a neighbor, a small company servicing the local community and physically located in it. At this scale, trust can be managed through tried-and-true social techniques humans are innately good at, and have successfully used for many thousands of years. This is how you make most of the tech industry and adjacent problems go away.

How expensive pouring some concrete into a small hole in the ground would be? Or would this become real estate then, or otherwise require a construction permit?

If Amazon want to leave packages securely, then I am more then happy for them to partner with mail carriers and other delivery services and come up with a common standard for an externally secure lockbox system*. But they're not getting an open door into my house.

The problem in the delivery space is everyone does whatever - there's no standard or common code for communicating secure delivery logic for a premises. You can come up with whatever and it just won't be used. But "give me access to inside your private property" is one of the more insane solutions given that a garage is not an unvaluable area, nor necessarily a non-hazardous one.

If I order something for delivery, it is the retailer's responsibility to deliver it to me. If they leave it where it is stolen before it's in my posession than that is not my problem.

Were it any other way I would not order anything online!

It provides a convenient service for both parties.

I realise that there are the porch pirates who are another issue entirely!

It's an open source project. Stuff generally gets worked on by people who care about features. You seem to care about this. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.io

Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37594377

That's cool to hear—I didn't consider we had that influence, though should've realized it after chatting with y'all, Ring/Doorbot, Particle/Spark, Pebble, etc.

Guess it took two generations to shake out the hardware startup mistakes. We were early and naïve, but we did ship, and the Twine servers remain up. You learned to focus the use case, and I still haven't. Go figure, I think there's still a space for a general-purpose physical computer, so we're doing it again: https://supermechanical.com/pickup

Funny that Kickstarter's history since is a hindrance, and we might go the Selfstarter route to produce the experience we want next time.

The only term that comes to my mind here is cancer.

Cards are $20. No programming fee, no handling fee, no processing fee. Yes, there are taxes and yes shipping things generally costs money. Users program keys themselves.

> As an aside, I find the fob useful for booting the car up prior to getting in, rather than waiting 40 seconds before the fly-by-wire shifter starts responding to commands to put it in gear.

Keys are for valet and I keep mine in my glove box. The car boots up almost instantly.

However, if even that is too much you can make a Switchbot do almost anything. It's just an actuator that pokes buttons and is a premade product with a shell rather than a DIY thingy.

But the US still seems to have some remnants of a high trust society, which has been only a temporary thing in many places, if at all.

Not having such a society adds frictions in all kind of interactions. In the end, that means cost. I can understand why people and company try to shift that cost when it comes up in areas where it wasn't present beforehand.

To put things in perspective, it's common over here for people selling things on Facebook/Gumtree to just leave the item outside and have the buyer slide the cash under the doormat. It's less secure but way more convenient, since you don't need to be home to complete the transaction.

I've left tools and other semi-valuables in my unsecured carport, in clear sight from the street, on a main road, for years now and they've never gone missing.

My sister in law lost her iPhone in a public bathroom and got it back simply by calling it and working out a time and location to meet up with the person who found it.

These aren't just freak anecdotes, by the way, they're the norm.

You should really consider coming over here. We need more Saffas in Australia!

This obvs does not work for other delivery companies but now you can see an option in the order forms to allow the delivery company leave the package at the door (e.g. IKEA). Otherwise, it is just unthinkable that someone would leave the package at the door without ringing you and agreeing in advance.

Not sure what effect this has but I live in an area with a lot of Ring (or other) front door cameras which is a rather severe disincentive to theft of packages left at the door (as well as mishandling of package delivery by the driver)

This is just conjecture, btw, I have no authoritative knowledge of their plans to do anything.

Big pink house on Foo St. (#8-5-5)

or

Big red-and-yellow-striped house on Foo St. (#8-8-5)

or whatever colors they are? If they are the same color, repaint one of them.

As a bonus, this will completely throw off all the automated data brokers, idiots that use "KYC" as an excuse to want to know where you sleep, etc.

Alternatively put an apartment number on your house (there will be only one apartment, of course.)

One of you will be

855 Foo St. Apt. 1

The other will be

885 Foo St. Apt. A

Outside of activation, it is easy to use MS Office for Mac completely offline -- there's a checkbox for that in preferences. You will lose some marginal functionality, some of which I prefer to be disabled (like generating pdfs of your documents server-side instead of client-side).

On neighbours, the carriers usually let you choose if you want this to happen, but it's just a normal part of life to accept (and hand over) your neighbour's parcels. I have done so dozens of times and had it happen for me, even in rougher areas where I barely knew the neighbours. I guess levels of interpersonal trust might be higher in Europe than the U.S.?

(That's before the blindingly obvious observation that even something provided by the government at no cost at point of use has a cost which is ultimately borne by the people.)

At no point does "preventing random people in your garage" required a greedy middleman in the path between you and whoever you want to give your garage door access code.

Not sure where you live, but every house I've lived in (USA, a few different states) during my entire life has had an exterior-quality door with exterior-quality lock, including deadbolt, between the house and garage.

In the one house I lived in that had a security system, that garage-to-interior door was also wired into the system and arming it would treat it like an exterior door.

Having said that, I still wouldn't want random delivery people entering my garage without my knowledge.

This was like 7+ years ago.

https://twitter.com/internetofshit

The more parties in a system, the more ossified it becomes. (Hello, healthcare)

Inevitably, the world changes... and now because there are so many intermediary layers the system as a whole is unable to adapt.

Then you're left with a system that can't be changed, that very efficiently does something different than what you need it to do.

Or, in a nutshell, most enterprise software older than 5 years.

I would say that almost all of it is, eg, disassembling our manufacturing and shipping it over seas - which ultimately eroded the middle class and jeopardized national security. But neither of those is on the balance sheets of the relevant company.

Anti-social short-term metricized business is the ultimate form of Taylorism — and in three generations, we can see that it’s an abysmal failure.

Sprinkling math on top doesn’t make reckless greed a good idea.

Add to it the time lost because software tends to be less reliable than its counterpart because multiple software interfaces tend to increase complexity. There are some things that software is wonderful for improving. But I don’t need a IoT stick of deodorant.

Additionally, I tried using an Aqara vibration/tilt sensor for more accurate "partially open" status reporting but it was a) not sensitive enough b) too unreliable c) too slow to update. I guess it's more meant for detecting impacts or falls.

I've also toyed with the idea to mount an ultrasonic distance sensor at the top of the (rolling) door, which could measure how far from the ceiling/far wall the top of the door is, but it'd be pretty bulky and problematic to power mounted on a moving part like a door.

I suspect that some of the the same reasons that lockers aren't economically feasible in most of the US is the same reason that the theft isn't a problem: low density. If you're a porch pirate, you need to expect that the value of your stolen goods covers at least your gas and time driving around stealing stuff, plus some risk premium for doing the crime. If the average value of a package is below this amount, the crime doesn't pay. There will still be instances where people haven't done this math, or crimes of opportunity, or just dense stretches where it does make sense depending on the price of gas, but it isn't a nationwide problem.

I get hundreds of packages per year (not an exaggeration) and as far as I know, exactly zero have ever been stolen. Missing packages are invariably delivered to someplace else that must have had a better vibe for the driver that day. (I’ll get pics of proof of delivery with a package that is clearly not at my house.)

In that environment, what problem do I have that could be solved by this, and how much effort (and aesthetics) am I willing to spend to solve it?

Now, if my house shared a wall with two other houses and people walked by my front door all the time, maybe I’d have a theft problem due to greater opportunities for it to happen.

Places with lawns probably don’t have nearly as much package theft just due to less foot traffic.

When this happens you have to go to a post office to get your mail.

But isn't the door property of the customer? In this case it is perfectly the customer's choice and right if they want to use the customer-facing API to let a delivery company in.

And when you're back from hiking the Alps your neighbor will have build a shed around it to protect it from the rain and moved in 10 of his pigs to keep it warm.

Unless of course your delivery guy tied your package to a special tree called Maibaum by mistake. Then you'll find a sign telling you that it has been redirected to one of the 5 villages called Kirchberg in your area.

But instead they just put a piece of paper in your mailbox that says 'you weren't home, we'll come back tomorrow'. Next day same thing. Only then can you go and pick it up at the post office.

Oh and there are many stories of people seeing the mail carrier defaulting to the piece of paper and not even knocking because of time pressure.

This is one of several reasons I no longer buy anything from Amazon. Not even if it's the cheapest source. Even if it gets to a Filiale, those are further than most of the shops that would sell similar items.

They could afford to give away the openers if they could win that revenue stream.

And Amazon would dump them in a second if consumers could instead click "Link your Home Assistant for secure deliveries and get $0.30 digital credit". Or more likely, Amazon would throw directly wired Dash buttons at consumers to enable secure deliveries.

Because the margins are incredibly low (thanks, Walmart and Amazon?), which means you need capital-heavy hyperefficient warehousing/distribution to even compete, which means you need scale, which means there's little competition to make things better.

They claim this, but my experience is that it's not true. VERY VERY often, it will be multiple days or up to a week before they attempt again. Sometimes they never attempt again, and a week or more later I get the notification that it's available to pick up at their depot. It's certainly not consistent enough to rely on.

Since Amazon clearly has no idea what they are doing, I would put up a note next to the keypad saying “Amazon drivers: just drop the package, there is no code”

Remember, the S in IoT is for Security.

They could simplify their business logic by making sure local first is reliable, and internet access can be turned off, and supporting vendors making (user-controlled, upgradeable, etc) gateways that handle the cloud/internet/local handoff

This current model is a fucking failure.

Gig workers quite possibly don't, or at least it's a significant effort for them to.

Some are amazing, mail is delivered perfectly, etc.

Others cannot for the life of them match number to address, and it doesn't seem to matter who is delivering as the attitude spreads across the office.

I think a huge part of this is missing actionable feedback messages.

If USPS/UPS/FedEx had better channels for "my mail was screwed up" reporting, to a granularity necessary to isolate bad branches, I think things would clean themselves up.

As-is, customers learn to live with it and the mothership is unaware the branch is screwing up.

This is fairly complicated to do locally and securely. If any e-commerce website/app could add tracking numbers as PINs to your smart lock via the local network, that would be a security nightmare. You'd also have to provision domains for every smart lock so that every lock can get Let's Encrypt certs and accept requests from web browsers without configuration. Not to mention most tracking numbers are easily guessable because they consist of a destination code and an auto-increment integer.

Also a lot of companies don't assign a tracking number until the package gets transferred to the last mile carrier. Again, if you're willing to manually copy-paste the tracking number after you get the shipping notification every single time you order something, you're clearly not part of the target demographic

If the latest shipment of crap from Amazon/Temu went missing. Annoying, but you'd just tell them the package got stolen and get a replacement sent out.

The problem is that there are people who drives through residential areas looking for packages to steal, cars to break into, etc. and that occurs quite frequently, as caught on our security camera.

It doesn't take many motorized perpetrators to lower the overall confidence in how secure it is to leave packages outside, given how much range the porch pirates can cover in a single afternoon.

I've had a single-digit number of packages never delivered, most of them years ago, from Aliexpress (which, at least back then, had a very buyer-favoring dispute process, so I would get my money back with three clicks or so).