I am surprised to see how overwhelmingly popular Tuya devices are for Home Assistant users. It appears that devices using the official integration are very combersome to setup, they are cloud dependent, and they will often need to be re-setup due to a re-acceptance of the ToS.
Are people actively buying these devices? Are a lot of homes setup with legacy Tuya devices?
I personally have no Tuya devices in my home and after reading the integration page, I would actively avoid them. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tuya
The integration page shows that Tuya is used by 29.2% of active installations and the number of devices from the graph show a huge gap between Tuya and all other devices. This leads me to think that these devices would be prioritized by the developers. Am I missing something? Are these devices so cheap that they are just worth it for many to deal with the consequences of the cloud and apparent hassle of setup?
The thing about Tuya devices is they are a white label provider which allows manufacturers to brand the Tuya Device as their own. This is causing a massive saturation in markets such as Amazon where the lower price is king. I had some Costco 'Feit" branded bulbs which turned out to set up on Tuya so it’s not just Amazon or Costco, other companies do it as well. I have a WiFi dehumidifier I bought before I got into the home automation scene which is Tuya based. They often masquerade behind apps such as SmartLife, Uhome or Feit and others with their GUI using nothing more than API Calls to the Tuya servers in China.
You can still obtain the local product keys on Tuya Developer portal which allows you to locally control your devices without the cloud, but they are making that harder to find. i was able to track some down about a month ago on a device I was evaluating. You can use other plugins too which decouple it from the cloud with your local key such as Xtended-Tuya, Tuya-Local and the like in Home Assistant so you can technically ignore the comms to China and I’ve found that some of those in tandem with each other have unlocked some extra features that the Tuya app never reveals for the device.
Ultimately, they are a very cost effective device to install in your home and often times you don’t know it’s Tuya Based until you poke around. I’m not defending them in any way, rather I am stating my observations and thoughts as to why it’s so pervasive. I wouldn’t be surprised if some Ovens or refrigerators were linked in some way to them as well.