I had been curious for a while when looking at aliexpress.com. So many different devices from different manufacturer have the “Tuya” label. Today I decided to take the time to find out. The gist is that Tuya works with these manufacturers to embed a communication chipset into their devices to allow them to work with Tuya’s common application and cloud infrastructure. You can read here for more info; hopefully this is useful for some other people.
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It’s called “white labelling”. Resellers can even choose how much they want the firmware to be modified, and can publish their own versions of the Tuya Smart or SmartLife apps.
Tuya has used this model to build a massive catalog of devices, and since they don’t sell directly to consumers they don’t have much responsibility (if any) for end-user support.
Most devices will work with the generic Tuya apps, but sometimes there will be changes that make them incompatible. For example, features might be implemented in a way that makes them only work with the reseller’s app. That makes every Tuya device a bit of a gamble. Personally, I’ve had reasonably good success.
Yeah, unfortunately for many new home automation users, the app is what they go for. And even worse, they will go for Wifi version of the devices instead of Zigbee’s. That said, Tuya has contributed greatly to the massive number of Wifi / Zigbee sensors available in the Chinese market now. And their prices are great!