If you’ve ended up with some devices in the Tuya Smart app and others in Smart Life, you’re not imagining the split. It happens because individual device vendors get to choose which app their setup flow drops you into. Buy a plug from one brand and you land in Tuya Smart. Buy a sensor from another and the QR code in the box points you at Smart Life instead. Neither app tells you the other exists, so a lot of people build up two accounts without ever deciding to.
Here’s what actually happens when you try to bring both into Home Assistant, why it’s structural rather than a bug, and the two routes that do work.
Tuya Smart and Smart Life are the same company, not the same account
涂鸦智能 (Tuya Smart) and 智能生活 (Smart Life, Tuya’s white-label app used by many third-party vendors) run on the identical cloud backend. But devices, Tap-to-Run automations, and account data don’t transfer between them. A device paired in one app simply doesn’t exist in the other, even though both apps are built and operated by Tuya.
That’s confirmed directly in Tuya’s own support documentation, which exists specifically to answer what the difference between the Tuya app and the SmartLife app is, a question common enough that Tuya felt it needed a dedicated explainer. So this isn’t a bug or a rebrand gone wrong. It’s the intended structure. One platform, two front doors, and whichever door you walked through first is where your devices stayed.
What happens when you add both accounts to Home Assistant
Home Assistant’s official Tuya integration authenticates against a single account per integration entry, whether that account happens to be a Tuya Smart login or a Smart Life login. The documented behavior when you try to add a second account is not “both show up”. It’s the first account’s devices and entities dropping to zero the moment the second entry is added or reloaded.
This isn’t a one-off report. It’s shown up in at least four independent issues across two different repositories.
- home-assistant/core #123576, “Tuya and Smart Life at the same time – multiple accounts active at the same time,” reported against Home Assistant OS 2024.8.1, closed as not planned.
- home-assistant/core #107729, “Unable to use two hubs for two Mobile App Accounts Smartlife & Tuya Mobile APPS with two separate IoT Platform Accounts,” opened 2024-01-10, closed as not planned and labeled stale.
- home-assistant/core #95744, “Tuya Integration – can’t use multiple accounts,” a fourth report of the same behavior.
- tuya/tuya-home-assistant #130, “Using Smart Life AND Tuya Smart Apps – Both Linked to same Cloud Project,” opened 2021-07-11, closed. Worth keeping separate from the others, because it describes one Tuya IoT cloud project deliberately split across both app UIs to control Google Home device-sharing granularity, not two unrelated accounts. Different root cause, same symptom in Home Assistant.
None of the four have a maintainer response committing to a fix, and none show a roadmap item attached. That pattern says more about the account model than about a bug that’s likely to get resolved. Four reports across two repositories, the earliest from 2021, none of them acknowledged as something to change, and community threads still asking the same question in 2026. If you’re waiting on an update to fix this, I wouldn’t.
The Smart Life integration on HACS isn’t a second integration
Tuya used to publish a separate Smart Life integration as a custom component, and it’s still findable. If you go looking for a way to run both apps at once, it looks like the answer, because a second integration for the second app is exactly what you want.
Two things to know before installing it. Tuya’s repository for that component states it has been integrated into the Home Assistant core project and will no longer be iterated separately, so the code is already in your install. And Tuya’s own documentation for the beta version states it isn’t compatible with the Tuya integration and that devices can’t be migrated between the two. Neither project documents running them side by side as a way to cover two accounts.
That merge landed in Home Assistant 2024.2, and it’s also why the login stopped asking for a developer account. The current integration takes a user code from your app’s account settings and a QR code you scan in the app itself, and that scan works from either app. One integration, either front door, still one account at a time.
The partial workaround, and where it stops working
There is one documented way around this, but it only covers half the problem. It comes from a Home Assistant Community thread, started December 2022, with activity as recently as January 2026, so it’s still current rather than something a later integration update quietly fixed. The steps look like this.
- Create a third, separate Tuya account to act as an admin account.
- In each of your original accounts, use the app’s family-sharing feature to invite the admin account into both households.
- Point Home Assistant’s official integration at the admin account only.
This only works when both original accounts are on the same app — two Tuya Smart accounts, or two Smart Life accounts. Family-sharing doesn’t cross the app boundary, so if your devices are split between Tuya Smart and Smart Life specifically, this workaround does nothing for you. It’s also unofficial: reported to work by one user on the community thread, not documented or supported by Tuya or by the Home Assistant Tuya integration maintainers.
| Scenario | Family-sharing workaround | LocalTuya / tuya-local (Wi-Fi devices) |
|---|---|---|
| Two Tuya Smart accounts | Reported to work (one user) | Works, per-device |
| Two Smart Life accounts | Reported to work (one user) | Works, per-device |
| One Tuya Smart + one Smart Life account | Doesn’t work — sharing doesn’t cross apps | Works, per-device |
| One cloud project split across both app UIs (the #130 scenario) | Not applicable — different cause | Works, per-device |
The actual fix: stop going through the account at all
The reason the family-sharing trick has a gap is that it’s still working within the official integration’s model. That integration logs in once, as one account, and pulls whatever devices that account can see. LocalTuya and tuya-local don’t do that. They integrate device by device, using each device’s local key and IP address. Once a device is added it has no live relationship to any app account, so which app it happens to be paired to doesn’t matter. A device from Tuya Smart and a device from Smart Life sit side by side in Home Assistant with no account consolidation. That’s not a workaround stacked on the account problem, it’s a different architecture.
Two limits worth knowing before you commit to it. The account boundary doesn’t vanish, it stops mattering after setup. Local keys are read out of a Tuya IoT Platform cloud project with an app account linked to it, and linking an account pulls in that account’s devices and only that account’s, so a split across two accounts means running the link step twice before you have a full set of keys. How to Get a Tuya Local Key in 2026 covers that flow, including the subscription error that stops a lot of people partway. tuya-local also offers a cloud-assisted setup that pre-fills the device ID and key from your Tuya account, which removes the developer-portal step but not the account.
The second limit is hardware. This route is for Wi-Fi Tuya devices, the ones that talk to Tuya’s cloud directly. Tuya-branded Zigbee devices have no local key at all and no account relationship once they’ve joined a Zigbee2MQTT or ZHA network, so if part of your split is Zigbee hardware, that half is already solved a different way. LocalTuya vs Tuya-Local covers how the two projects compare if you haven’t picked one, including which LocalTuya repository to install, since the original is stalled and the maintained fork is elsewhere.
If what sent you looking at two accounts in the first place is a broader discomfort with how much Tuya’s cloud sees regardless of which app you use, Does Tuya Send Your Data to China? covers that ground separately.
Frequently asked questions
Are Tuya and Smart Life the same app?
They’re built by the same company on the same backend, but they function as separate apps with separate accounts. A device set up in one won’t show up in the other.
Can I use both a Tuya and a Smart Life account in Home Assistant at the same time?
Not through the official integration. Adding a second account’s integration entry has been repeatedly reported to zero out the first account’s entities rather than showing both.
Should I install the Smart Life integration from HACS to cover the second account?
That component was merged into Home Assistant core in 2024.2, and Tuya’s repository says it isn’t developed separately any more. Tuya’s documentation for it also says it isn’t compatible with the Tuya integration and that devices can’t be migrated between the two.
Why did my other Tuya account’s devices disappear from Home Assistant?
This matches the documented behavior in the GitHub issues above. The integration authenticates one account at a time, and reloading or adding a second entry replaces the first rather than adding to it.
Is there a way to merge devices from Tuya Smart and Smart Life into one account?
Not officially, and the community family-sharing workaround only merges accounts on the same app. There’s no documented path to merge a Tuya Smart account with a Smart Life account.
Does LocalTuya or tuya-local have the same two-app limitation as the official integration?
No. Because they integrate per device using a local key rather than logging into a single consumer account, which app a Wi-Fi device happens to be paired to doesn’t affect whether it can be added.
What’s confirmed here, and what to verify yourself
Tuya’s support documentation is the source for the app split being deliberate rather than a bug, and that part isn’t likely to change. The one-account-at-a-time behavior in Home Assistant rests on four independent reports across two repositories, all closed without a fix, plus community threads still carrying the question. That’s the claim worth re-checking against your own version before you plan around it, because integration behavior is exactly the kind of thing a release can change without much noise. The family-sharing workaround is one user’s reported result on a community thread rather than a supported feature, so treat it as worth trying, not as a path with a guarantee attached. The per-device route is documented behavior of LocalTuya and tuya-local, not a new claim here.
No Tuya hardware was set up for this piece, and nothing above should be read as a tested, step-by-step procedure.