Philips Hue 4+

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!?!?

Just started using the Philips Hue products about a week ago. Overall I am impressed with their products. This app is decent, seems intuitive to use. There are 2 things I would really like to see from this app. 1. Be able to sort rooms. This would be very helpful. I would like my rooms to be listed in Alpha order without having to go in and redo all of them. 2. Be able to add sub-rooms (maybe a different name) to rooms. If I have light bulbs, the play bar, lamps, etc in the same room, I would like an easy to to control them with in that room without having to create separate rooms for each set of lights/devices I want to control in a room.

Update #1: I figured out how to sort rooms, that is great, wasn’t very obvious to start, glad it is available. Since using the Philips Hue system for a couple weeks I realize some other things I would like to see. It would so nice to have a pool of available scenes, since there is a limit to the number of scenes and devices that can be on a hub. This really should not be that difficult to implement. Also another easy implementation would be to have a checkbox on your sensors, something along the lines on the Do not disturb that is in the labs. Except it really doesn’t need to be all that complex, simply if you have a scene on do not change it. Those are two very easy fixes that I would love to see.

I have had Philips Hue lightbulbs since they first came out, and the app keeps getting better. But it is missing one critical function that costs users a ton of time and effort if they wanna upgrade their bulbs: you can’t seamlessly add a new bulb and have it “replace” an old bulb and all of its scenes and settings.

If you have dining room chandelier with an 80 W bulb that is integrated in 10 different scenes, two switches, and 4 automations you have programmed, and you want to upgrade it to 150 W bulb, you will have to manually delete the old lightbulb from every scene (or or you will get a warning that the scene failed every time you implement it) you will need to manually add the new lightbulb to every one of those scenes, switches, & automations, and reprogram the correct color, temperature, and brightness of each bulb as well. It is a big pain in the backside. And, ironically, it discourages people from wanting to upgrade their lightbulbs, which you would think Phillips wouldn’t want.

So please, Philips, if anyone on your team reads these reviews, please add some sort of wizard to the Hue app that allows the user to buy a new Hue bulb and be able to have it replace an old one in a seamless way, so that it inherit the old bulbs name and all of the different scenes and switches it was involved in. Make it easier for people to upgrade their bulbs and buy more of your products.