[This is NOT about any particular connectable devices, or how to connect or use them, or SmartThings compatibility. I’m just curious about this/these company/companies, and figured I’d ask here, because I know there are a lot of smart peeps here who also like to try different technologies, etc.]
Can anyone give me a quick and simple explanation of these product/company/technology names, and how they are related to each other?
Like, are these all names of different divisions within one company, or of different companies under one umbrella company, or simply different names for the same company?
I have one of the Merkury RGB LED Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs from Walmart, and I can control it (directly) from any one of at least three different mobile apps (named Geeni, Smart Life, and Tuya Smart), and indirectly through Alexa, and SmartThings.
This is not necessarily intended as a discussion about any of their hardware or software, but please feel free to mention them as is necessary in any explanation you may be willing to offer.
Tuya Smart and Smartlife are the same company just different versions of the app like smartthings and smartthings classic.
Geeni Smarthome and Merkury Innovations are the same company Geeni is just a brand name of Mercury but they are not with Tuya. Tuya just does the devices and software for them.
Im pretty sure tuya makes the software and hardware to the company’s specifications. https://en.tuya.com/
If you look at the Geeni Smarthome website about us page it says its by Mercury.
And the Tuya website says that they make custom apps and devices for companys.
How i discovered this is that i bought a wifi smartplug from a thrift shop and the app for it was missing. Since i already had a Geeni plug i tried to try and pair the unknown plug to the Geeni app and to my surprise it worked. So i researched why and found out that both plugs were based of Tuya software. If you look at most cheep wifi smart home devices chances are they use Tuya software.
OK, great. Thanks for sharing your findings.
It’s just always interesting to me how these kinds of things come about.
Seems sort of similar to how Centralite has made stuff (at least hardware) for multiple different Home Automation companies (at least SmartThings and Lowe’s Iris).
I guess this sort of thing probably goes on a lot in the industry (and in electronics manufacturing, in general), huh?
Sure. For years “Kenmore” appliances were made by Maytag and Frigidaire. (And Maytag itself is just one of several brands made by Whirlpool, while Frigidaire is owned by Electrolux.)
As we have discussed many times in the forum, Nortek, one of the largest manufacturers of Z wave devices, often sold the exact same device under five or six different brand names, literally just with a different label on it
In the PC market, this term is OEM.
Jasco is another Home automation manufacturer who makes the same device and then sells it under different names or provides it to other companies to sell under their own name. You can get the same Jasco device sold under the Jasco name, the GE name, or now the Honeywell name. I think they also used to make the DragonTech models.
Nowadays there is yet another complication as many Chinese factories Will offer the exact same physical case to multiple clients, resulting in devices which look identical but which may have different internal parts or firmware.
