Philips Hue 4+

We’ve had a house full of hue lights for 10 years. After a while they get into my rhythm. They turn themselves on and off and it’s like having my dad when I was little. Always saying, “who left the light on”. Recently we did some remodeling and the bathrooms got 36 inch round mirror set in a bracket with spools of thread to hold it at the right distance. It looks great. Everyone wants one and we saved so much money doing it ourselves. My son came along and I asked him to set the auto sequence. At first I was annoyed because he could see the light blue walls, so why did he make it pink. Then a few minutes later it went back to blue. He set it up to say good morning. I see you. And I love you. In lights every morning. Thanks for being a part of us Hue. Even if the lights in my son’s bathroom turned off when I was in the middle of my shower. Oh and as our system aged, it was harder to get the right power cords and plugs. If you are going to change the engineering, support it. Don’t make me look on eBay!!! I love my globe on the back porch. I love to teach the kids how to make it any color their finger gets to. I have an ap for a thunder storm and it makes the kitchen cabinets turn on like florescent bulbs how they kind of bounce. These things bring me joy because I am comforted by light. Leave the light on!!

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!?!?

I am obsessed with my Hugh Phillips lights! So much so that I’ve bought nearly $1000 worth and I don’t regret a thing. The app design is slick and modern, with an easy to understand, intuitive layout. Some of the features, such as unstacking gradient, light strips with multiple color options within the color wheel, take some googling to initially uncover. But once you get the hang of it, it’s fun to design your own scenes. There are a few things that I wish Philip would improve upon. The grouping system, especially related to syncing music and other media by creating “entertainment zones“, can be somewhat frustrating and can leave you with several overlapping groups. Moreover– as a previous nano leaf user – I can say that Phillips lacks the lighting customization options that the former’s app permits. Some of the lights seem capable of additional color points yet gradients are always limited to three no matter the size or length. Finally, I wish Phillips would release more presets that you can install on your devices. Addition to the 30 or 40 that are always in the store, it seems they occasionally release seasonal presets. But there is no way to share or view additional presets either Phillips designs or customers. Overall, I would definitely recommend lighting your house with Phillips Hue. The app could just use a bit more fine-tuning to provide the functionality that competitors apps seem to allow.