First of all, their app usually takes about 30-60 seconds to load up which is pretty frustrating when you're waiting outside your garage and trying to get in, just waiting on a spinner as it has to go talk to some cloud server somewhere.
Second, I use Home Assistant for pretty much everything, and Chamberlain has a habit of breaking their API every few months. From what I've gleaned they seem to change how they allowlist user-agent headers to try to intentionally break things like Home Assistant.
Eventually I got tired of it constantly being slow and/or not working, and I threw it away. I replaced it with a programmable Z-Wave contact relay (Zooz ZEN16). It works much better now.
Lastly, the newer Chamberlain motor units actually don't use simple push buttons anymore, so what I've done isn't even an option. I believe it's some kind of PWM over the wire to the wall-mounted buttons. I would recommend not buying any Chamberlain product because of their anti-consumer behavior.
MyQ is probably the best $30 I’ve ever spent.
I’m under no illusion that that APIs are appropriately handled, or that it’s great for all workflows. But for me, it delivered the expected functionality, no RPi hacking required.
If you solder, even just a little, you can attach a pair of wires to the board in the wall mounted button so you can control it from whatever project you are doing. I using pins on a pi to flip a relay and complete the circuit as if I pressed the button.
The button panel for my ancient opener runs off of two wires, and each button is connected through a different value resistor, so I'm assuming the way it works is it measures the voltage drop to tell if you pressed the door or the light button. But, just connecting the two leads from the opener is enough to open or close the door, and I never use the built in bulbs on the opener anyways.
I did this about 8 years ago, and hooked it to an Insteon network, which is ultimately connected to my HomeAssistant setup. If I was doing it today I'd probably do the same soldering but wire it to something I could run tasmota on (and control via mqtt).
Presumably by bouncing everything through some anonymous Alibaba cloud ip addresses, effectively granting permission to the Chinese government to open your garage door whenever they like... :sigh:
(Actually, it seems like its at least not completely awful, security wise: https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/other-blogs/mcafee-labs/we-be-j... )
It’s quite nice though. You can even have Amazon drop their packages inside the garage through some single use token or something. I for one have way too much value of tools and whatnot in my garage to grant that trust but I wish I could.
Compare this with AladdinConnect that comes with the Genie lifts - they have broken people approximately zero times.
We had 5 garage door openers in our apartment at the beginning of the work from home period for her testing.