That's the wild aspect of all this. On the one hand, lots of people in the industry and those who had technical experience knew this. But, on the other hand, the 'leaders' of the industry would not talk about it and most enterprise buyers do not have enough hands-on comparative experience to really know what's what. The result was that while a minority of people knew it was obvious, most did not. This is changing, we have been publishing our OEM directories the past few years, the US government is now stepping up enforcement, etc.
And for Honeywell, yes, they really tried to hide this. They never disclosed anything and still have not on their website on Dahua OEMed devices, even with the government ban now law. And when Honeywell's field people were pushed about why their products looked identical to Dahua, they would talk about custom firmware or custom designs, etc.
To get a sense of how institutional this became, we asked the US Security Industry Association (SIA) last year the following question repeatedly:
> In SIA's expert opinion, if a product is produced in China but then an American company applies their label and their colors to the UI of a product, does SIA consider that product still produced in China or produced in America?
They refused to answer it -
SIA Plays Dumb On OEMs And Hikua Ban