I said it in another post, but Haire owns several other brands as well:
The home appliances business, namely Haier Smart Home, has seven global brands – Haier, Casarte, Leader, GE Appliances, Fisher & Paykel, Aqua and Candy.
Also this video seems to suggest that this home assistant addon do not contact the cloud. But this addon do require the usage of Haire cloud service, and all command issued using this addon is sent to the cloud. Probably because there is no local API to communicate directly to the appliances.
Personally, I just use a IR blaster to control my AC locally. It is less reliable, but I never use AC when I am not right in the room with it, so reliability is not a problem.
Personally, I just use a IR blaster to control my AC locally
Same, it works really well for me. In fact, my AC unit is a little older and can only be controlled through Infrared (or through buttons on the unit itself, but that’s stupid)
Voting with our $ never works: this never stops them but libre software licenses and censorship resistant technology does secure our software availability.