Hopefully less confusion about which apps work with what devices.
TP-Link’s entries in the smart home ecosystem can occasionally get a little confusing. The company has two smart home sub-brands: Kasa and Tapo. The worst part is that they often overlap with each other, and there’s no clear differentiator between both brands. TP-Link has seemingly already realized this and will start to merge them under one app.
A new update to the Tapo app is finally letting owners of Kasa devices control them from one single app. You can migrate all Kasa devices you happen to have around your household (if you own both Kasa and Tapo devices), and blend them into any routines you might have from the Tapo app. Curiously, this only applies to the Tapo app, as the Kasa app will not add uphold for Tapo devices. In a statement, TP-Link said that “the Tapo app now serves as the unified platform for managing both Kasa and Tapo devices, leveraging its comprehensive ecosystem that spans across more categories than Kasa and eliminating the need for users to switch back and forth between separate applications.”
If we were to speculate, TP-Link might pick to fully merge Kasa into Tapo in the near or far future. That would be the logical course of action—after all, as we said before, many of both brands’ products overlap, to the point you might even occasionally see identical products belonging to both brands with only minor differences. This is not happening for now, though, and in fact, it’s something that TP-Link itself is denying, adding that “it’s important to clarify that, despite this integration, Kasa and Tapo will remain as distinct and independent brands.” So this is probably the closest we’ll get for now.
You can check out the updated version of the Tapo app and migrate all your Kasa stuff once you’re done updating it so you can have everything under the same app with the same routines. This is not quite solving TP-Link’s craziness in the smart home market, but at the very least, it’s making things a bit better. If the full migration does ever happen, hopefully it won’t be as confusing and time-consuming as Google’s slow migration from the Nest app to Google Home.
Source: The Verge
