I used to be fan of TP gear, thankfully I found this thread before purchasing any of your smart devices. You have lost another customer.

Not sure if anyone from TP actually reads this but you should know:

1. I went through the process of creating an account and login just to write this message, that should tell you something.
2. I removed all TP gear and have switch to ubiquiti gear which is not cheap
3. I am now buying your competitor products because they just work, I just orderd more smart plugs.

@Wayne-TP 

We are now over a year past the start of this thread, and TP-Link still has not provided a real answer, an official statement, a roadmap, a fix, or even a meaningful acknowledgement of the problem.

This thread now has 31 replies, tens of thousands of views, and people are still finding it by the day. More importantly, people are not just complaining. They are saying they are returning products, avoiding future purchases, replacing existing Kasa/Tapo devices, and ripping TP-Link hardware out of their homes entirely. That should be setting off alarms somewhere inside TP-Link.

So at this point, I have to ask directly: is TP-Link really going to continue standing behind the position that “Home Assistant is unsupported” and that the Kasa/Tapo API was never public, as if that somehow resolves the issue?

Because it doesn’t.

Customers bought these devices because they worked locally, integrated well, and were useful outside of a single vendor-controlled app. Whether TP-Link officially documented the API or not, that local functionality existed, people built around it, and firmware/platform changes have now broken or severely degraded that functionality for a growing number of users.

The “third-party compatibility” toggle is not a serious answer if it does not reliably preserve local control, does not work across common home network designs like VLANs, and does not provide a stable path for Home Assistant users. It is especially not an answer when customers are reporting authentication failures, broken integrations, cloud dependency, unreliable recovery after outages, and devices becoming effectively useless for the setups they were purchased for.

You represent TP-Link here. Surely there is some internal communication channel where these concerns can be escalated to product, engineering, firmware, security, or whoever actually owns this decision. Why that does not appear to have happened in any visible or productive way is honestly beyond comprehension at this point.

This is not one angry customer yelling into the void anymore. This is a long-running public thread full of loyal TP-Link customers saying the same thing: we want local control, we want Home Assistant support, and we want TP-Link to stop treating interoperability as a security problem instead of a customer expectation.

So can we stop hiding behind the old “official stance” and start working toward an actual solution?

A reasonable solution could be any of the following:

1. Official Home Assistant support.
2. A documented local API.
3. A supported local-only mode.
4. Firmware that restores the prior local behavior.
5. Clear release notes before firmware changes that affect third-party or local integrations.
6. A real public statement from TP-Link explaining what changed, why it changed, and what the path forward is.

The smart home market has changed. Customers expect interoperability. Matter, Home Assistant, local control, VLANs, privacy-first networks, and mixed-vendor ecosystems are not fringe use cases anymore. Fighting that change is only going to cost TP-Link more customers.

At this point, the question is simple:

Is TP-Link willing to work with its customers toward a solution, or is the official answer still “use our app or leave”?

@JohnClark So Ubiquity provides a solution that can integrate into Home Assistant for smart power plugs and strips (with per outlet control)?  I have to look into that.  If I go through the same issue again (like after the next power outage), I will be looking to swap out at that time.  Hope TP-Link listens to us.

Thanks!
 

Harry

@hharamis 

Ubiquiti does have some power management options, and I’d be lying if I said the thought hasn’t crossed my mind.

I already run Omada for my network, and Omada is basically TP-Link’s version of the UniFi ecosystem anyway, so moving over to Ubiquiti would not be some massive jump. The problem is Ubiquiti is prosumer gear, and “prosumer” is usually just a nicer way of saying “this is going to cost more than it probably should.”

That’s what makes this whole thing so frustrating.

A lot of us are still sitting here hoping TP-Link does the right thing. Why? No idea. It’s a corporation, and corporations usually do not care until enough people leave and the money starts making noise.

But look at this thread.

Only around 30 people have actually spoken up, but there are over 50,000 views. That is not nothing. That is 50,000+ times someone landed here, probably because they were having the same issue, researching before buying, or trying to figure out why their setup suddenly stopped working.

Even if a tiny percentage of those people decided not to buy Kasa or Tapo because of this, that is still a lot of customers walking away.

And that’s the part I really do not understand. People are openly saying they returned devices, switched brands, or are planning to rip out their TP-Link gear, and somehow this is still being ignored like it will just go away on its own.

Most people here do not want to replace everything. They already bought into Kasa, Tapo, and TP-Link. They just want the stuff they paid for to keep working the way it was already working.

TP-Link could still fix this. They just need to actually acknowledge the problem and give people a real path forward before more customers give up and move on.