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Chamberlain shuts the door on its HomeKit garage door hub citing low sales

The HomeKit ecosystem is losing one of its most useful and most reliable accessories. Chamberlain has announced today that it is discontinuing the myQ Home Bridge Hub, which allowed you to control your garage door with HomeKit and Siri.

For those unfamiliar, myQ is Chamberlain’s platform for controlling your garage door using your smartphone. The technology is built into some of Chamberlain’s more modern garage door openers, but the company also sells a retrofit version that adds the technology to older garage door openers.

But that version of the myQ Smart Garage Control hub doesn’t support HomeKit. Instead, the company had been selling a separate myQ Home Bridge Hub with HomeKit support at a higher price point. While the myQ Smart Garage Control sells for $30, the version with HomeKit often sold for as high as $90.

As noted by The Verge, the myQ Home Bridge Hub has been out of stock on the Chamberlain website for several weeks. When asked for comment, Chamberlain confirmed that the product will not be returning and has been discontinued. The company added that existing Home Bridge Hubs already sold will continue to work “for the foreseeable future,” but with no additional details.

“As our products continue to evolve, we have decided to discontinue production of our myQ Home Bridge Hubs,” George Rassas, group product manager at Chamberlain Group, said in an email. He also confirmed that existing Home Bridge Hubs will continue to work “for the foreseeable future.” 

According to Rassas, “less than 1 percent of myQ users were using the myQ Home Bridge.” Instead, most were opting for the cheaper and non-HomeKit version.

Will Chamberlain release a new version of its myQ Home Bridge Hub? It doesn’t seem like it. “Our goal is to provide compelling smart home solutions as we continue to work with leading connectivity brands to deliver seamless products and services that complete the smart home,” Rassas said when asked.

9to5Mac’s Take

Top comment by Eric Vaandering

Liked by 14 people
Part of the problem was that this was so confusing. IIRC, there are garage door openers with MyQ and garage door openers with MyQ+Wifi. And then you could add a bridge to those to either turn MyQ into MyQ+ Wifi or MyQ+WiFi+HomeKit. It took me a not-insignificant amount of research to convince me I was buying the right thing to make my opener HomeKit enabled. Then there is the lack of functionality. My garage opener has a light and a thermometer, but neither of these are exposed in HomeKit. There is definitely a market for openers that have all this stuff built in without an extra box you have to purchase and plug in. Let's hope they see that.
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Another HomeKit accessory bites the dust. And this time, it leaves a gaping hole in the market. As The Verge points out, Chamberlain controls more than half of the garage door market in the United States.

There are other smart garage door openers on the market with HomeKit support, but we haven’t tested them and can’t vouch for their reliability. Speaking from experience, the myQ Home Bridge Hub was rock solid in terms of reliability and it’s a shame to see it leave the market.

This underscores a major problem with smart home technology. Chamberlain claims the myQ Home Bridge Hub will keep working for now, but what happens when there’s a bug that needs to be fixed? What about a security flaw? The company’s statement doesn’t instill confidence that we’ll see any future updates.

Ideally, Chamberlain could bring HomeKit support to the myQ Smart Garage Control, but it doesn’t seem like that’s in the cards. This is also something that technology such as the Matter smart home standard could solve, but again, Chamberlain doesn’t seem keen on adopting that.

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Avatar for Chance Miller Chance Miller

Chance is the editor-in-chief of 9to5Mac, overseeing the entire site’s operations. He also hosts the 9to5Mac Daily and 9to5Mac Happy Hour podcasts.

You can send tips, questions, and typos to chance@9to5mac.com.

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