Will 2021 be the best year for Tuya and Home Assistant?

10th August 2021

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Tuya Smart home platform

Tuya and Home Assistant have been working together well, but very limited. The ‘Powered by Tuya’-logo is showing up on more and more Smart Home products. This means that the Tuya platform is expanding and it means the product can be used with the Tuya and Smartlife app and also with SmartThings and IFTTT, as well as all the popular voice assistants: Apple Homekit, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. Tuya is at the moment the biggest IOT company, with more than 5000 different brands and more then 100 000+ products and it is still growing! Tuya started with Wifi devices but today there are lots of BLE and zigbee hubs that are working with Tuya.

We have discussed the Tuya platform and the Smart Life app before (tuya article), but we were a bit sceptic about the Tuya platform network. Reasons were the discontinued support of IFTTT, the announced limitations of the API access for developers and the lack of support to run your setup locally. However, there seems to be a large shift in direction that changes the smart home proposition and especially Tuya and your smart home system. Read along!

Where to buy smart home products that works with Tuya?

We already made a post with some suggested and Tuya support products with different product, you can find it here. But you don’t have to order Tuya product abroad anymore, you can often buy Tuya in your local outlets. In the Netherlands you can buy products at the Lidl, Action, Hema etc. All white labeled products that use the Tuya platform. But the biggest platform to buy smart devices is still AliExpress. Often te products are still a bit cheaper compared the ones in the local outlet.

Tuya and Home Assistant

Tuya and Home Assistant already worked together, but there was a lot of room for improvement. Home Assistant has developed an official Tuya integration that now can be used for a few device types. Besides that, their are some custom integrations and methods, so you can even use Tuya products locally without the need to run them in the Tuya cloud. These methods are all outdated, complicated and not officially supported by Tuya.

But here comes the great news: Tuya and Home assistant are partnering up now!
Tuya developed their official Tuya v2 integration. Currently this is still a custom integration that is still in a beta phase and can be installed with HACS. But with the help of the Home Assistant developers, the idea is to replace the current official integration. That means that Tuya get support officially both on on the Home Assistant and the Tuya side, and there is no longer the need for components or difficult procedures to get all the Tuya functionalities in Home Assistant.
The second thing that is awesome is the fact Tuya has announced that they are planning to support offline mode!! An internet connection to the cloud is still needed authenticate once and get the device info, but after that Internet is not needed anymore for connect to the Tuya cloud. So everything can be run locally, which means you can control you Tuya devices even when the Tuya service or your internet connection is down! Tuya and Home Assistant become an even better combination, since Home Assitant can run the local instance of the Tuya platform 🙂

https://developer.tuya.com/en/docs/iot/Home_Assistant_Integration?id=Kamcjcbvk2mu8

Get Tuya devices into Home assistant

An always up to date how-to-guide is written by the Tuya team: https://github.com/tuya/tuya-home-assistant

It covers the two things you have to do for now (that could be changed when officially integrated):

Tuya Beta Test Program
Tuya IoT Platform

Tuya v2 Custom integration

Custom means that Tuya developed the custom component, but with help of the Home Assistant developers this become deprecated over time and all the Tuya and Home Assistant work will be integrated in Home assistant without extras.

The future of Tuya!

Moving from the custom component repository (HACS) to the official integrations is a great step forward.

But moving from cloud dependency to local supported is maybe even bigger!

Because Tuya supports so many brands and type of products not every category is supported (yet) at the moment. Check what is already supported officially: https://github.com/tuya/tuya-home-assistant/wiki/Supported-Device-Category

Tuya Beta Test Program
Tuya IoT Platform