[Brajeshwar]

Here is a fun story. Just like you, I too live in a “gated community”, and we also default to MyGate. We have a founders group in there, and the things with MyGate and its irritations would sometimes come up. We all would wink and go about our days. The founder of MyGate is in the group and is one of the neighbors. We sometimes teased that we would just camp out outside his home, asking him to fix these excessive notification issues and bugs, and to add/edit features. ;-)

Another founder friend lives in a different mid-sized community and was using MyGate. He got pissed not just at the ads but at the massive data gathering—contacts, camera, flashlight, and everything. He ended up creating https://dobermanapp.com

[OkGoDoIt]

That doberman site feels kind of sketchy. It doesn’t say anything about the hardware required or how someone would integrate this. Also it says it’s free but then one of the five top level pages is the SLA which says it doesn’t apply to free plans. I really don’t understand if this is just a random landing page that someone created to gauge interest or what.

[userbinator]

If I were in that situation and had no other choice I'd just RE the app and figure out what API calls it makes, and reimplement it myself.

[ved_a]

Ah we live in the same ‘gated’ community and probably are neighbours then ?