Leave a Review Philips Hue
Does not work with HomeKit
Update: I found (literally after writing this review) what the issue was. Somehow, a different or
Old bridge was still linked into HomeKit. How it reappeared, I don’t know but it happened as soon as I updated to 17.2. Once I removed ALL Hue bridges from my HomeKit (which crashed my HomeKit app), it finally worked after re-linking. I’m sorry for the bad review, Phillips. I believe this is a bug on Apples end than it would be on yours. Updating the rating to reflect that. I hope this review helps someone who may be having issues and may have had an old hue bridge in the past.
Phillips Hue integration with HomeKit is entirely broken with the iOS 17.2. I can no longer control my bulbs/bridge with my iPhone 15 Pro Max, HomePod minis, iPad Air, nothing. Everything is set up correctly and it even shows up in HomeKit, but it refuses to respond. HomeKit constantly says “this accessory is not responding”, despite it successfully connecting during the setup process when linking with HomeKit. I’m at a loss. The developers have had access to iOS 17.2 way before it was launched to thoroughly tested it. I have troubleshooted the issue and exhausted all options.Show lessItsTheJu
Decision Fatigue
More often than not, I want a dimmer switch more than I want my desk lamp to turn purple. If I leave the room and turn off my lights after setting a custom brightness (e.g. turning down a desk lamp because it’s bright outside) I have no way to easily return to this custom, temporary state. I want to save power, but I also don’t want to spend a minute fidgeting with my lights to get that perfect brightness again. When I return to the room, I can choose a custom preset (good feature), or individually turn on lights. One misclick on the binary slider for a light opens a detailed menu for colors that I rarely use. This menu has many buttons, and is distracting when I just want a simple, large dimmer switch to push most of the time. Also, it is not possible to remove some preset scenes from the menu. I want a clean, simple experience for my light switch. I don’t need my lights to have a green and purple button that I can’t hide. Yes, it’s awesome your lights do that. I’ll use it on Halloween. No, I don’t want that button prominent in the menu the other 364 days of the year. The app has great potential, but is frustrating for one of my common use cases. I still love the lights, but I find the current app interface detrimental to the experience.Show lessArenheim
Best lighting for a lifetime!
I have been using hue lights for since they came out it has to be at least 10/10 years ago! They are without a doubt the most reliable easiest and best lighting I’ve ever used! I’ve tried to use other bulbs it’s just not the same. The color is so vibrant and true to its claims to be so vibrant. Also they are the colors that are exactly how you wish for them to be. Please whatever they do over there at Phillips Hue don’t stop because I can’t live without them! I use the colored lights in my home. I have them in six different places for lighting for my home. I will say this there is never a laggy bit, they’re always easy to connect and stay connected and they can’t be beat in any category except for cost. HoweverI bought my last set about 10 years ago so they paid for them self Id say. Don’t hesitate by them they’re worth it last forever they look beautiful and make you feel even better. Lighting is everything and lighting can’t be done right in my opinion not without Philips Hue color lighting Only!Show lessBB Lovah
Changing the terms of service and apparently breaking working products
Hue has apparently recently decided that unless you create a new account with them, they will prevent you from being able to use the lights and accessories you have fully paid for.
I have been using their products for several years without an account until the past few weeks that I have been notified that unless I sign up for an account with them that lets them gather more information about me, they will prevent me from controlling the li go to that I own going forward. I’ve exchanged emails with their support several times and the only response is “you can still control your lights without the internet” (not sure how setting up an account works with no internet), and “I’m sorry, but this is a new policy change and you have no options”. I’ve repeatedly asked how to get a refund for the devices they intent to prevent me from using any more, to which they have informed me that they don’t view this as something they should refund.
With all the other options coming into the market, I highly recommend you avoid Hue’s ecosystem unless you are comfortable doing business with a company that will intentionally disable products you already own.Show lessWizardlyHat
Developer Response
As the features we develop grow, so does the need for more advanced security. To keep your accounts and products secure and ensure you get the most out of your system, you’ll need to create a Philips Hue account soon. We want to reassure you that your system will still work without an internet connection. After creating an account, your data will not be sold to any third parties, and you will only receive marketing communications based on your device and account preferences. Philips Hue needs to offer the owners of our products a robust way to manage which applications, users, and ecosystems have access to their products — and that requires a way to securely identify the owner of the system. Our solution to this will be the Philips Hue account. The previous mechanism used to identify users — based purely on physical access (e.g., pushing the button on the Bridge during setup) — is no longer an adequate solution. We want to give users the tools to keep their data as safe as possible, so we believe that change is needed. Though the full functionality of authorizing access to your Philips Hue system and managing its users will not be fully rolled out when accounts become essential (most notably for Bluetooth users), Hue accounts will still be the foundation on which we’ll be able to implement these features. After creating an account, you’ll still be able to control your lights without an internet connection — just like before. Any usage data collection and marketing communications will remain optional.Great system BUT has some has ridiculous faults
I absolutely love the huge system. The only thing I do not like about it is how many times I go to buy lightbulbs and it comes with a bridge. I do not need a bridge. Every time I go to buy lightbulbs. This bulbs are expensive enough and I should not have to buy another bridge every time I get more bulbs and expand. There are also some problems that Philips seems to refuse to address like if you turn a routine off then back on a day or two later it may not actually turn on the first time making it unreliable. I have contacted Philips HUE about all of my issues even those not listed in this review and expressed how much I love the system still, their response was to make me part of their beta program to help them evaluate new and current products & I was also told I would get a small discount on items I purchase but I do not get the discount I was told so costco, BJs and Sam’s club are where I have found the best deals. I also feel like they wasted a lot of my time telling me they were going to send me all sorts of products to test around late 2019 but as of February 2023 I still have not gotten any and when I contact Philips they have no idea what I am talking about so they wasted 4+ hours of my time getting me set up for their beta/new product test program for nothing! To make matters worse the problems with the routines still is not fixed!Show lessAPSturm
This app used to work
I have been using the hue lights for a couple of years and they worked great! Now they don’t and I have had it. One of the biggest selling points for this product is that they are tightly integrated with HomeKit and should work seamlessly. I spent money on bulbs and a bridge and they worked great for little while. Now I can’t use HomeKit with these anymore and it’s such a hassle to work with them anymore because I have to open a app that takes a full minute to load and connect if I can quickly access it and toggle the switch. I am frustrated as much as I can because I have had this issue for over a year and this is a known issue that Philips is refusing to pay attention to. I don’t trust that if I get a new one that the same issue isn’t going present itself since the issue is clearly a software bug that Philips is biding their time on. I am trying to make as much noise as possible because I like the product and integration but if it’s broken and can be fixed (and believe me I have tried everything I possibly can multiple times to fix it) because the app still sees it and the lights still respond to the app, then it should be a bug that is easily squished. I would recommend going to something else that doesn’t require you to spend 3x as much on their ecosystem of products when the lights and their basic switches work just as well. I got them for the convenience and they are no longer convenient or easier to use. Please fix this!!!!Show lessmatthew4066
App filled with bugs
Put 75 hue lights in my home and after a month wish I’d gone with a different smart bulb. Nothing good to say about the app. It’s far inferior to LIFX and Govee in user friendliness and customization. On top of the fact you need 2 bridges for as many bulbs as one needs for a house which requires 2 different accounts to control. This means you can’t control the entire house with Alexa nor can you control the entire house without switching back and forth. The app itself has bugs galore the most annoying being with scenes. It constantly rearranges my scenes out of order as well as changing the brightness setting inside those scenes. Creating automations is a nightmare compared to LIFX or Govee. You can’t change brightness so instead have to create several scenes and multiple automations to accomplish the same thing both other apps can do at 1 time without creating any additional scenes. Custom scenes also are not available across all rooms so you have to constantly recreate or copy paste into each room over and over again. This becomes a big problem as there are also not any preset solid colors. So in order to make all rooms red with a touch of a button, you have to create a red scene for every room in the house.Show lessCodhutch
Great overall; has a few issues
The Hue system is the best I’ve seen for home smart lighting, hands-down! The app is beautiful, and the out-of-the-box scenes are gorgeous, and work pretty seamlessly; the more Hue lights you have, the better it looks, and it scales automagically when I add new lights. The automations are the only disappointment I have with it at all; they’re super basic, and haven’t improved much over the last ~3 years or so since I’ve had Hue lights. A recent update actually seems to have removed some of the previously-available functionality of the automations, and/or made the UI for that part of the app very unintuitive (I’m not sure which yet — still trying to figure it out since the changes). It’s way more difficult (impossible?) to get really granular scene fades/changes than it should be, IMO. To be fair, it looks to me like they’ve been focusing on making automations “just work” out of the box, rather than making users create a bunch of complex automations manually, but for those of us who have really specific ideas about how we want our automations to work, the automations are still woefully lacking, even after all these years of time they’ve had to build those features out. There are other apps that pick up some of the slack, but they’re very unpolished and in some ways worse. So, all that is to say — yay for this app for being the best overall app available for Hue lighting, but why are the automations still so basic, after all this time!?!?Show lessSeth Seger
RFE: Allow Bridge, light updates without Internet access
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed my Phillips Hue lights & light strip over the past few years. Setting up scenes is fun & useful. I have scenes for when I’m reading, scenes for movie watching, & scenes for nightlights when I’m going to sleep.
I have a suggestion. If I want to use Hue lights on a network not connected to the Internet, & there’s been an app update, often the entire Hue system is inoperable until applying firmware updates to the bridge &/or lights. Please consider an option to download necessary firmware updates over cellular to the app, then connect to the WiFi network & apply the firmware updates directly from the phone.
Right now I have to use a convoluted method to do this. I connect my MacBook Pro to my iPhone over USB. I share my iPhone’s Internet connection over USB to my MacBook Pro. I share the MacBook Pro’s Internet connection over Ethernet to my WiFi base station WAN port. This gives my iPhone Internet connectivity & access to the WiFi network simultaneously so I can install the update. I really shouldn’t have to do all that just to turn my lights on. There’s been lots of updates lately so this is very annoying.Show lessamasri
Scene navigation still horizontal (left to right)
Updated: the natural light option has seemingly been removed. Back down to 1 ⭐️ for inconsistency. Updated: Natural light addition is appreciated. Matter support also. Extra star for that. But I rarely use the app to activate scenes because that’s screen scrolls horizontally and the app doesn’t rotate on iPhone. I use Apple’s home app so I can see more information and use the product more intuitively (vertically). Updated: the iPhone gets taller, but Philips makes navigating their scenes horizontal (left to right). So the bottom third of the screen is unused, and empty of information, and I can only see the status of 4 bulbs at once. Unless I scroll out of sight. Literally out of sight. 1 star. At least the apple home app is stacked vertically. It’s so obvious… Old: When i swipe left on my home screen, the UI/UX under my fingers moves in the same direction: left. In this app, when i scroll left, the UX/UI under my fingers moves in the opposite direction: right. Hence, inverted. Thankfully I didn’t update the app on my phone and can still use the better, older version. How does this happen?Show lessAmplifiedLife
