Hughie said:
DJI can lockout any competition because the main controller has to query the battery. If the battery status is not what the main controller expects, that battery cannot be used.
I suspect, that with all the flack out there, DJI won't do that. I am also kinda sure they will make little to no effort to ensure their battery firmware updates won't brick an aftermarket battery. But, with the bad publicity in a quickly growing market (quad copters), I doubt they will try any longer to ensure aftermarket batteries don't work. I could be wrong.
That aside, we are nearing the point where I think firmware updates will slow to a crawl.
Hughie said:
Perhaps a better way of breaking the DJI battery stranglehold is not to use cloned batteries, but instead to leave the DJI battery electronics as is and attempt to replace the battery cell unit itself.
Some people are already trying this. I bought dual Phantom 1 battery "shelves" to try the same thing. I was planning two 3s 3,400 mAh batteries attached to a DJI cap. The weight increase wouldn't be drastic (an extra 80g - 120g), but the power increase would be 1,600 mAh.
Either way, if the market is big enough (which I think it is, especially with all the Phantom 2 variants) v1, Vision, Vision+, Vision V2+, etc), I suspect that aftermarket battery manufacturers will do their best to continue to try to reverse engineer the electronics and keep their batteries compatible. Sure, that means there may be some problems along the way, but at some point, it becomes a losing battle for DJI that starts to cost them more money than it is making them.
A perfect example can be seen in laptops - specifically Dell crap, with the chargers that communicate with the laptop and report a "non OEM charger connected - charging rate limited" (and CPU throttling enabled). Aftermarket manufacturers kept at it, and Dell stopped trying to change things to make aftermarket chargers cease functioning. Now, there are a ton of clone aftermarket chargers.