The Chinese smart home specialist Tuya has been a supporter of Matter for some time. As a member of the former Zigbee Alliance and today’s CSA (Connectivity Standards Alliance), its name appeared early on in presentations of the smart home standard. End consumers, on the other hand, are not very familiar with the brand, which is related to the Chinese company’s business model.
Tuya does not act as a provider of devices itself, but offers its services to other companies that want to launch smart home products on the market. These can obtain wireless chips and the appropriate integration from Tuya – including IoT platform and apps. The promise: From initial prototyping to mass production takes just a few weeks, a rapid pace considering the time and effort required for development and certification. Smaller companies can easily spend months on the process. Many solutions from DIY stores or discounters are therefore based on Tuya technology. They are sold under trade names such as Benexmart, Calex, Geeni, LSC and Woox.
According to the company, the Tuya ecosystem comprises more than 1,100 product categories, from light bulbs and hot air fryers to networked rice stoves. The devices are operated via a cloud and apps designed for this purpose. Among the best-known are Tuya’s own application Tuya Smart and the Smart Life app.
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2022, Tuya officially announced that it will also support the Matter standard on its platform in the future (link). What this means in concrete terms remains to be seen because one advantage of Matter is that the devices also work with a local connection without a manufacturer’s cloud. In any case, Tuya’s support should open up a large market of potential products. So far, the Chinese use WLAN and Zigbee as wireless protocols. The first one is part of the Matter standard anyway, Zigbee components can be made compatible via their gateway – as Aqara or Signify already intend to do. And who knows, maybe Tuya will also include Thread as a third wireless option in its range.
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