Yandex built its smart home solution on a Chinese platform, although it has its own

The Tuvio mobile application for managing smart equipment of the Yandex Market private label works on the Chinese Tuya platform, although Yandex has its own development in this area.

Equipment on a third-party platform

The Tuvio mobile application, designed to control smart equipment of the Yandex Market private label of the same name, uses the smart home device platform from the Chinese Tuya, Kommersant found out. Although Yandex has its own development in this area.

Tuya is indicated as the operator of personal data in the documents with which the user agrees when registering with Tuvio. The application interface is visually similar to the examples given in the documentation for the Tuya OEM App service (smart home application designer for contract manufacturers).

Why do you need a foreigner in a “smart home”

Since 2019, Yandex has its own smart home platform, “Home with Alice,” built around a voice assistant of the same name. The company was unable to provide CNews with comments on why a foreign backup was needed.

Yandex could have used a third-party turnkey solution rather than adapting “House with Alice” in order to minimize the time for initial development (time-to-market), says the co-founder of the digital platform development company Arcsinus Pavel Golub. According to him, the solution from Tuya allows you to create a smart home platform, including a mobile application and firmware for devices, in a short time, often in a few weeks, “many Chinese device manufacturing companies assume that the customer will use the Tuya platform” .

Until 2022, it was also used by Sberbank smart devices. As it turned out, they were based on Tuya Smart. Users started having problems with it in April 2022. They complained about the impossibility of pairing new “smart” lamps and other devices in the line with control devices, including smartphones.

At the beginning of April 2022, Sberbank added to the list of organizations subject to anti-Russian sanctions. Against this background, his smart devices stopped connecting to Tuya. Tuya Inc. has Chinese roots, but its shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In August 2023, SberDevices, a subsidiary of Sberbank, told CNews about the creation of a new line of smart home devices under the Sber brand. The gadgets are not tied to foreign services and are linked to a domestic cloud platform, which eliminates the impact of foreign sanctions on their operation.

Private label from Yandex

Yandex Market began developing its own trademarks in the fall of 2021. The first products from the line of electronics and household appliances under the Tuvio private label appeared in December 2022.

The Tuvio application supports functions typical of smart home platforms: creating rooms, automation scenarios, inviting other users to control.

Tuvio uses its own account system, not associated with Yandex ID, and in “Home with Alice” you cannot link a Tuvio account. Yandex told Kommersant that support for Tuvio devices in the Yandex smart home ecosystem “is included in one of the upcoming updates to the Home with Alice application.”