Philips Hue 4+

Ok so after years of using Hue in selected lights and lamps, when it came to rebuilding our home I went all the way. 50 lights inside, 12 outside plus 10 on the 12v garden lighting.
I added an extra hub, which did improve things … though it’s a real pain I can’t have out of home control on .
In all other respects despite my wife’s concerns it’s been a great success.
Integration with Alexa makes all the difference being able to set simple commands like Relax, Mum, Bye Bye etc. The versatility is actually more of a feature than the convenience.
It’s probably taken 3 weeks to sort everything properly but it was still functional from day 1.
Out of interest I put 2 switches in the house as back up. One controls the main loop the other all the subsidiary lights. Haven’t needed to use them at all.

The app works well, though I am very upset that the integrated Philips Hue light control widgets have been removed. In the app it now tells you how to set up Siri Shortcuts as widgets when you go to the widgets menu. This makes it incredibly inconvenient to have all the widgets in one compact area like you could in the previous version. Now, you can fit either 2 or 4 “widgets” into the same space that you could previously fit 8. I am quite annoyed that this feature is now gone, as this is the one that was most useful to me personally.

It has also been made more difficult to change the colour of a room’s lights all at once without making a special scene just for it. Now, each light must be changed individually, whereas before you could adjust the room as a whole.

Overall the only noticeable improvement has been the style and appearance of the user interface. As far as the functional features of the app go, it feels like a step backwards that has removed useful features, though this is coming from the perspective of a person who does not use the automation features of the app very much.

The ability to start a timer and have the lights fade during the course of that timer (or even start fading at the end of the timer). You have the option to have the lights fade off over 5-10 minutes if you wish, but it’s based from a set time (eg. every day at 9:30pm) But what about when you don’t go to bed at the same time every night? I use this for my kids and there are times I want to say “5 minutes until lights off” but then I have to go in manually and set the “every day” time to 5 minutes after the current time in order for my desired effect. It’s very frustrating. I don’t know if this is making sense. But I can’t find this functionality anywhere, or on any third party apps and it would be so simple to implement. It would be the one thing I’d need to take my experience to perfection. Other than that, I’m in love.