Tuya/Smart Life

About the vendor and its products

It is a little difficult to figure out what to call tuya and Smart Life, but as far as I can tell tuya is (the Chinese) mother company, which offers a platform for smart home devices that other vendors can use, instead of creating its own platform. Smart Life is seemingly part of the tuya corporation, but aimed at consumers and offering physical devices under this brand name.

It is impossible to present any list of such products, since there are so many vendors using tuya, and these have products in arguable all categories of smart home devices. Examples of manufacturers presented in these pages, which are based on tuya, are Calex and ZemiSmart.

There is both a tuya and a Smart Life app, and it seems to be possible to choose which one to use to connect to tuya-based devices. In addition, there is support for tuya-based devices in Homey, Home Assistant, Homebridge, etc.

Our experiences

Our experiences have been somewhat mixed. In the beginning we only had a few smart bulbs, and these were somewhat tricky to maintain in Apple Home. It required a tuya developer account, and after some time, it became mandatory to renew this every six months to be able to use it for free, and it could take some time to get this approved. I was therefore about to decommission our tuya devices, but then the company changed policy, meaning such integration became much easier. It only requires a normal user in either of the apps, and there is now even an official tuya app for Homey. We therefore now have many products based on tuya, including some for which there are no real alternative, such as the combined smart fan and ceiling light from the company Lindby, which we have in the living room and the master bedroom. These work excellently in Apple Home via Homebridge.