Well I will say I did love them for a day. I didn’t have any brightness issues or major issues with the strands except for one light. I did call the company and they are sending a replacement. So I guess service was good. First point,This is not Phillips we are talking to, it’s seasonal selections. They must have a license with Phillips, but the large company Phillips has not much to do with these lights except their name on the box. Reason for return:They worked pretty good. Basic app functions was entertaining. Their are some big holes in the app that could improve and you can read the other reviews to easily find the issue. But the reason I have to return them is it is still a manual process. What does that mean? Well there is no built in timer so I need to go to the app everyday to turn them on, ugh no. Two if you have a timer on the outlet and you use that to turn the lights on and off, that’s fine, but the controller box resets and you will still need to go to the app and turn lights back to your desired scene, ugh no. If I pay extra for simplicity, but they still make it manual then I could have just bought $15 lights and used my own timer and been less intrusive. Issues:TimerBox resetsFunction limitation Custom programming is elementary Doesn’t support Apple MusicNeed ASAP:Timer or way to use own timer and keep settingsWould be cool and worth the $100 spent:IFTTT integrationBut don’t expect anything updated, when I called and talked to them the lady on the phone was rather annoyed and didn’t think to be an issue. She was like you can go to the app and make changes. Well I told her people that buy process utilization items don’t want to go to your app everyday. So I guess I have to buy $15 to be happy.

I bought the starter kit and with 3 strings of lights it worked fine. The system is supposed to be able to handle 12 strings of lights (25 per strand up to 300 lights) but it doesn’t. The startup kit and light strands are hella expensive. They’re also a brilliant idea: smart phone controlled LED lights that can go from cool white to warm white to colored lights to animated lights, presets or play to music. Definitely worth the money, if they worked. Now, after having invested a couple of hundred in lights I thought would last a few years, I’m back to $8 lights because these simply don’t work. The app has a stupid menu set up and after unplugging and replugging the control box (as recommended in the troubleshooting) the system no longer accepts the password and no matter how many times I tried to get the system to read just 5 light strands, it doesn’t.Oh yeah, Philips didn’t even manufacture this and no longer supports it. They simply slapped their label on it and resold it.

I saw lots of negative reviews for this app but I haven't had any problems getting everything to work perfectly. Other older reviews that suggest new features all seem to be incorporated in the current version. I have two starter sets with a dozen extra strings. It works great. Once you connect the control boxes to your home WiFi it’s easy to make the lights do whatever you want. You can use these lights for any holiday just by creating a custom program with whatever colors you want. Red, white and blue for 4th of July. Red, pink and white for Valentine’s Day. Green and white for St. Patrick’s Day, Your favorite team colors on game day, etc.I nailed my lights to the bottom edge of the facia board around my house using 1/2” wood staples. They are hard to see in daylight which allows me to leave them up year round without looking tacky.Edit - I removed one star because you can’t set multiple custom colors to show at the same time. I would like to have a custom colors where every other bulb is a different color. You can set all the lights to a single custom color which changes to another custom color but all the strings will only be that one color at a time.

It’s hard to rate the app because it works for what it does. The terrible part is the product in very aspect, plus the lack of true customization and some other issues. You can’t really program anything special. Just a basic fixed 5 colors that repeat over and over down the strand. Yay can’t choose only 2 colors, you have to choose 5. You can make it repeat 2 colors but every 5/6th bulb is gonna repeat the same color. In any regard, you are forced to choose 5 colors. That’s it. Then they can fade in and out or be on or off. And that about wraps up the custom side of what you can do. The presets are ok, wish there was more as you go through them quickly and realize some just don’t look good, and others are sort of boring. Plus with all the twinkling effects and color fades, you’d think you can make custom ones yourself like them, but sadly no. This is my second year with these lights. The first year they replaced a DOA set. This year I plugged them in and another strand is not working. Plus on a years time, this app has had ZERO updates. I’m pretty sure they are just trying to forget these were made and move on, or they just truly don’t care. Either way, I hope this review helps someone decide not to buy these lights.