Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsSo not buy these bulbs or anything that uses Tuya -- tuya has broken Home Assistant
Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2023
Edit again -- now I'm seeing all over the Home Assistant github that people's devices using tuya are gone from Home Assistant. It seems they expired our authorizations. It has been a day since I filled out the form begging for an extention, meanwhile all my bulbs don't work from my home assistant.
Stay away from anything Tuya. Period. Down to one star.
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I bought four of these on sale and installed them in my living room. They work well enough, use the TuyaSmart app, and work ok with home assistant.
The Tuya app is kind of trash. It's the same generic app that any company using the chipset can rebrand, except it is not developed. It is just the barebones toolkit. Setting up isn't intuitive, you have to add, go to the device type, pick the correct device, then ignore when it tells you bad things. For example, these are 2.4ghz only, and I have a mixed mode router. I get a warning that it's connecting to the 5ghz, ignore it, and everything works fine. Sometimes you have to do it twice and it only works the second time.
It's also not a full featured app after you get the bulbs connected. So you can't do anything complex and setting up is... well, it's just really poorly laid out. For the price of these bulbs, you're not going to get anything customized.
There's no way to not call home to china with these, either, you have to use the tuya smart app to get them set up before doing anything else.
Home assistant, once you've added everything with the app and done all the steps to set up on the development platform, will pull any newly added bulbs in seamlessly with the Tuya integration. They've worked great on my isolated network since setup with HA.
As for the customer service, I bought a second 4 pack to do two more fixtures and have spares. One of the four bulbs was DOA. I contacted customer service via Amazon and they had a replacement on its way a day later.
Again, these are about the cheapest smart bulbs you're going to buy. That's pretty good customer support for a bargain product. They're 4 star bulbs, and a fifth star because the price point and the company backing it's product.