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?
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Tuya makes zigbee devices that are cheap. It is the only tuya stuff I tend to use.
I highly dislike wifi dependant devices unless they are larger more complex devices that get stable updates.
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.
Does this Tuya include Zigbee devices? I don’t have any wifi based Tuya devices but it’s surprising how many generic cheap Zigbee sensors are Tuya.
Roughly 1/3 of my Zigbee devices are Tuya branded, if you buy from AliExpress it’s a strong possibility.
No, zigbee devices no matter the brand don’t need extra software because they use the zigbee communication protocol.
The Tuya software on HomeAssistant is used to bridge HomeAssistant to the tuya devices via the cloud generated keys if i remember correctly. The wifi tuya devices are the only one that utilize it and they still connect to tuya’s cloud services.
Ah right, I misread that chart as manufacturer not integration and didn’t really look at the details. That does seem odd that Tuya is that prevalent, they don’t seem that common on troubleshooting boards which I’d expect if they were used that much. I wonder how much self selection is happening here in the labs project and how much it will change when it’s opened to the community.
I would convert them over to esphome. Once they started locking them down I quit buying them.
IMHO the developers are waiting for tuya to do what all the others have and shut down the servers. Once that happens there will be around 29 percent of HomeAssistant users really angry.
I’m guessing a lot of people started off with tuya devices and then found HomeAssistant they continue to use them because they have them and they still work. It you are thinking about buying some reference my previous statement. It’s not if but when they will stop the cloud servers.
Tuya devices are super cheap, often sold as massive loss leaders and frequently rebadged as other brands (MOES comes to mind, as well as lots of “iThing” type brands)
It is not surprising at all that lots of folks eschew the mobile app and use HA to control them. Also the Local Tuya integration is difficult to use and often doesn’t work at all.
I used to buy their stuff and use
tuya-convertto flash Tasmota onto them. But they kept updating the firmware to lock that out, and I ended up returning a batch of 15 smart plugs because none of them would flash. They were too much of a PITA to try to crack open and flash the ESP8266 manually so I returned the whole batch as defective, left a scathing review, and blackballed the whole brand.
