Contact Philips Hue Support

I (like many people) have heavily invested in the hue brand. My favorite part of the technology was the old app, which had all the functionality and usability I was looking for in an app to control the lights in my home. And that’s saying something, as I develop software for a living and work daily with app developers, so I’m a critic of UX design. The new app is total garbage. It’s semi-aesthetically pleasing and takes nice screenshots for the App Store. That’s the end of it’s nice features. It goes downhill from there. Vertical + side scrolling is idiocy and only useful in a demo by the product owner to stakeholders. Again, stop making app usability decisions based on what takes nice screenshots. Dimming individual lights is now impossible. You can’t even be consistent on where the x button is on the screen. Or whether it’s and x or a back arrow. And different types of lights in a room causes a different screen to show up with equally horrendous but different UX. All I want to do is see my lights in a list and dim them in the same screen. And for the love of Pete, the side scrolling scenes DO NOT need to be the first thing on the screen. How many times do I need to say it, stop designing for screenshots. Have you used your own app in the real world? I use this app 50 times a frickin day. What if someone moved all of the light switches in your house and now you have to go hunting for them all over the place? This app is worse than that. Try again.

I wanted so long for V3 to come out. Total disappointment. Basically it is prettier and easier to use. As far as more features, not much. The one I really wanted was Sensor customizations. You cannot pick which lights in a room to have turn on or off. I have multiple Hue lights in my bathroom. I have a Sensor in it. I want my Sensor to detect motion and then if it is night time, turn on only the cabinet lighting very dim. This is just so when you go to the bathroom at night you don’t have blaring lights or have to get your phone out to turn them on. In the Hue App, the only option is to have ALL the bathroom lights come on. You cannot pick just one or two lights. You can do this in HomeKit, but then some of the customizations for the Sensor Hue allows won’t work. (I.e. how strong the motion had to be to work, how long to keep it on, etc....) Hue Hyped this new version for months if not a year. Now it is here and like I said... it basically is the same app just better designed. Very disappointing. Will not be buying more sensors until they fix this. One last thing... same thing is true with Hue Tap and Hue Dimmers. Both only let you pick rooms, not individual lights. Dimmer only has 4 customization areas when there are 5 in HomeKit. It’s like Hue forgot all about their accessories. C’mon... I wasted $250 on 5 Sensors, $100 on 2 taps, and $200 on 5 Dimmers and all of them you can’t do what you claimed you could when I got them.

With the new update, the recently used color palette has been removed, and it is now impossible to copy colors to new lights and new scenes. I don’t understand why this feature would be removed, but doing so has made the app almost entirely useless for setting up new lights, or moving lights to new rooms. Speaking of which, the biggest problem with this app from the very beginning has been the fact that you can’t easily copy scenes to new rooms. Why can’t we create scene templates with our own preferred colors, like the built in Hue scene gallery options (Bright, Dimmed, etc)? Even when we had access to a palette of recently used colors (before it was removed with the new update), it was still an incredibly tedious task to go through and recreate every scene for a new room. But now it’s no longer inconvenient, it’s literally impossible. Please bring back the recently used color palette, and then finally add the ability for users to save their own custom scene gallery. Also, why have we never been able to apply the same color to all lights in a scene?! Why do we have to go through every light individually? 99% of scenes are going to be the same color for all of the lights. The entire purpose of this app is to allow us to customize our lighting, and it has never made any attempt at streamlining that process.