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.
Of course, I changed my code after that, but drivers still tried to get in with my code code. I opened countless tickets with Amazon to get this reference to my code removed from their system. They gaslit me many times saying it was removed. They were incredibly rude to me when told them they were lying to me, and now I sometimes get delivery drivers getting pissed off at me (for some reason) that the code doesn't work after they ring my doorbell.
What I want people to get from this story is, don't give Amazon your code. Get a separate delivery box instead or even a storm door works to hide most packages.
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”
Amazon's problem is that they outsource the delivery and there is such a terrible turn-over problem with delivery drivers (and delivery contracting companies) that nothing works at their scale.
No one will ever question it.
I once bought a book delivered to a company (where I dont work anymore) and this address cannot be deleted. Multi billion company. LOL
On a side note, Amazon's interface is so much worse than Allegro
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.
I don't know what Chamberlain has to gain by sticking it to that particular demo. For HA to be a threat to the "partnerships" like Amazon, it would have to have an audience sizeable enough that Amazon would consider incentivizing adoption.
I would say it seems dumb to piss off the most passionate fans of home automation when you're a vendor of equipment that such people might want to buy, but Chamberlain has such a stranglehold on the market that I think they figure that even if they royally piss off that 5% of the garage door opener market, those suckers (or their garage door installers) will be forced to buy the gear from them anyway.
Yes and no. At the scale Amazon operates, I can see value in being able to automate the process rather than requiring each driver to find and operate the keypad for each garage.
Automation, if implemented perfectly (which it obviously won't be) also prevents one form of bad actor. An Amazon delivery driver who uses your code in the future to gain unauthorized access to your garage. Automation allows this code to be limited to a single use.
