Philips Illuminate 4+

I too wish I would have read the reviews on this before shelling out $$$ on 4 strands of these lights. The thought is nice, and the lights are pretty and versatile but the thing has to be reconnected to the app every day. It’s super annoying and time consuming. Once I reconnect I can use the app. I haven’t tried customizing anything yet because I waste too much time reconnecting. I also haven’t tried music because I can’t figure out how to use anything other than Apple Music and I that isn’t where I have a subscription. Definitely could be tons more user friendly.

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.