Twinkly Reviews

by Shimmer Factor

Last year I bought 4 sets of this app lights for holiday decorations, and had them up for roughly 3 months. This year when I went to put them back up for the holidays, one set was completely dead. Thankfully it was just inside the 1 year warranty and was replaced. Another set died a few weeks later, and since it was just over the warranty period, I was out of luck, and this app refused to replace it. While I understand that a 1 year warranty is fairly standard, the fact that I only got 3 months of use from the product before it failed is frustrating. Additionally, having half of the 4 sets I purchased fail in such a short time means that I won’t be adding any more of this product to my home as I had originally planned. In addition to the issue above, this app support actually told me “we are just a brand, you bought it from a retailer and it’s their job to replace it for you”. Which is… nonsense. This is YOUR product, you should stand behind it. Trying to push responsibility on the retailer is absurd. I won’t be purchasing any more of these lights, and I’ll recommend my friends don’t either. Throwing away a $200 purchase after just a few months of use is ridiculous.

In response to the developer response:
I’m not asking you to honor replacement outside of warranty. I’m asking you to make a product that last longer than 3 months of use. That seems fair.

by Matthewdon

The lights are cool... when they work. this app customer service is the worst. They may correspond with you once of twice about an issue, but will stop responding. I’ve spent about a thousand dollars on these lights, and the cool factor wore off this year when half my lights stopped syncing and this app stopped caring. Not to mention they overpromise and under deliver. Check out their website, you’ll notice they show a cool effects feature releasing in November, just in time for the holidays... getting customers hyped up to purchase more! But, unfortunately, Twinkly update never came, and instead we were left with a buggy app that constantly crashed, doesn’t show the status of lights half the time, and effects show spinning logos instead of the effects that should work. Save your money... you’ll end up being frustrated!

by SABeard

When it works, it’s cool. That’s all I can say that’s positive. Despite being set up correctly, and having high WiFi speed, Twinkly loses connectivity whenever you want to make a change-whether that’s with your lights or with your WiFi network. I am constantly losing connection to WiFi, and it is NOT a WiFi issue, I have had to reset my this app back to factory settings three times now, and I don’t have the ability to “apply” effects that I have created. The biggest problem with all of this is that there is no one to call or chat with. The only way to get help is through email. (Or you can look up their faq’s-but be careful-I tried following one of those, and a follow up email said “oops sorry-the wrong information is on our site!” AND the last I checked, that info is still there months later). In addition, if you are in the states, the time difference is huge, so you will never get a prompt response, and OFTEN the response does not acknowledge info that you’ve already given them. It can take a couple of weeks to resolve what should be a simple issue.

These lights have cool capabilities, but the interface of Twinkly with them is terrible. I would not spend this much money again. It’s a shame too, because I would buy more strings if Twinkly functioned better.

by BAC05

Last year, Twinkly worked pretty well: now, it’s abysmal. 3D mapping doesn’t work at all. If you complete more than 2 reference photos, Twinkly stalls, freezes and this stops. A lot of the downloaded presets don’t work and won’t even show on the preview page. I was going to purchase more and get the pro line. Now I’m considering a return. The tech could be great, but Twinkly makes these worthless.

Original post: I can see where there would be problems with Twinkly. It does freeze from time to time and needs more options for static or twinkling lights. It works well with second generation but again Twinkly is somewhat clunky and freezes. I’m excited to see what this company can do in the future. Pre-lit garland and wreaths that operate on batteries would be awesome. Even ice sickle battery lights would be great. Bottom line, I think that people that have 1st gen lights, as those that have the pre-lit trees, are having the most issues. Buying 2nd gen lights, you shouldn’t have that much problem.

by ???123456

Spent a fortune on a new tree. The lights operated their preprogrammed operations but the tree would never even see the this app WiFi. So, we reset the unit per the directions. After that, the tree wouldn’t operate properly at all, even the preprogrammed operations. We returned the tree and got another. Had the exact same problem. Finally, after trying EVERYTHING, we found that the tree would only work (and it worked perfectly) only after shutting down ALL WiFi in our home!!! We tried stepping down from 5G to 2.5 (I believe). That allowed us to finally see the this app app but not connect. Obviously, having a fancy tree but not being able to have ANY WiFi in the house is not acceptable. I’m still waiting on an email from tech support of this app to see if they can resolve this, but it’s looking like this tree is going back for a refund and I won’t be buying ANYTHING this app again. This sort of interference should have been accounted for prior to pushing out the product.

by April Arcus

Update 22 October 2020, version 2.12.3

The developer responded promptly to a bug report, which is much appreciated.

- - -

These are great lights; undoubtedly the best in their class. But Twinkly doesn't let them live up to their potential.

1.) No Homekit support. I want to be able to control and automate these like a Hue or Lifx bulb. The playlists feature is okay, but what I really want is to associate each effect with a timer, so a new effect can start at sunrise, the start of my work day, early evening, and bedtime.

2.) No Shortcuts support. I want to be able to write scripts to turn lights on and off and set them to a certain scene.

3.) No Siri support. I want to control my lights with voice commands.

4.) Can't edit new colors after creating them (to e.g. compare to each other). Can't manually delete a color palette after creating it, instead palettes are automatically deleted at unpredictable times.

5.) Can't rearrange layouts. Tiles always go in alphabetical order by light name; can't reverse horizontal or vertical orientation. This forced me into some awkward wiring choices!

6.) Most effects only feature blinking rather than smooth transitions. Effects which do have animations are jerky and and have low-framerate compared to the built-in effects.

7.) Finally, my lights have developed a stuck pixel. I'd like to be able to unmap it.

by Frankie142622

We love the tree. It’s an exciting talking piece during the holidays.
However, this review is for Twinkly . It’s remarkable that going into 2021 a company can’t have a functioning app. Twinkly has so many glitches, bugs, it’s more frustrating than anything else. After downloading all the different light sequences, creating a playlist (greatest option Twinkly offers), creating your own custom sequences, setting the on/off Twinkly literally goes haywire after a week. The playlist disappears. The downloads disappears. The settings revert back to the beginning. The on/off button doesn’t work. I can’t really put into words how frustrating. You take the time to create custom lights and a week or two later it’s gone. Family comes over and just when you want to show all the displays, Twinkly suddenly doesn’t work. To fix this you have delete Twinkly , re-download and set everything up from scratch. Just be prepared to do that a few times. Oh and the firmware update seems to fail every time there is an update. Twinkly also gets stuck refreshing.
The only answer for all these issues is incompetence, laziness on the techs part. It’s a real shame, because this has such great potential.

by ImHopin

Can’t wait for developer to make Twinkly functional. Absolutely brilliant idea, very frustrating in current form. Really like to customization potential, but multiple times I got 90% of the way through setting up my custom colors etc only to have the entire thing disappear. No option to do a partial save, and once you have saved it you can not edit or modify it in any way. Would also be nice if it could tell you how many lights you have not programmed when customizing. Even better would be if the program had a randomization feature that I could set by percentage, i.e. I want to do an even distribution of 10 custom colors, would
like to set each to 10% of the bulbs distributed randomly over the tree. Saw the FX function mentioned as having been released; having that would be some
Improvement. They have a way to go, I only hope that they add this sort of functionality to Gen 2 devices. Will be ticked off if I have to buy a new tree to get this thing to work as advertised.

by Chad Holmes

I absolutely love the tree and lights when it works....which it will for a couple weeks. Several issues with Twinkly , I don’t understand why it is so hard to NOT have a buggy app in 2020. Seems it’s more about laziness than anything else to me. Controller isn’t the highest quality either. My app keeps disconnecting to controller, also 90% of the time it has an error saving the playlist, which is the coolest part of the whole tree. Today more than half my effects disappeared and wouldn’t let me download any new ones, which I had downloaded all available already, but they had disappeared from my list. I think giving Twinkly 2 stars is generous. Twinkly is 95% a part of the motive to buy this tree if you can’t get a playlist or have the tree do effects there is zero reason to have it and Twinkly is the only way to really do it unless you want to be stuck with only a couple effects. This company should really get with the program and FIX your app!!!!

by Tom54235773

Since updating the firmware on my lights, it appears I can only connect to the lights from Twinkly ~1 time after plugging them in, if I try to connect again an hour later it shows the lights as unavailable. Really takes the fun out trying different designs and patterns. At least the lights still function even if Twinkly won’t connect. Support was responsive but unhelpful.

Previous review:

My expectations were a bit low given the reviews, but so far everything has worked well. I grouped two strings, mapped them, and have been able to apply effects. WiFi-isms were not a problem. Didn’t use the fancy iOS WiFi setup stuff that some devices do, so you have to type in your password, but joined my Eero network without issue. I do wish the library of effects had more options that were on the subtle end of the spectrum. Just give my a dozen different twinkle options with slightly different color palette and speed options.

by Nenuphar7

I would tell everyone with the cash to spare to buy this tree/these products. The lights are phenomenal. HOWEVER... about an hour after installing app and gaining control over lights on tree I was prompted to update the firmware. Biggest regret of my life I think. Twinkly is now useless and I can control nothing with it. There is nothing within Twinkly that helps me make sense of this. I have no doubt there exists a fix somewhere somehow but they obviously have software troubles overall and in this day and age it’s hard to excuse a lack of effort put into making sure your premium product works as intended for people. Don’t obscure the problem...at least put something in your FAQS. I’ll troubleshoot this more when I have time. That’s why I got an artificial tree, right? Because I’m full of free time leading up to Christmas.... The lights are gorgeous though.

by Lightdisappointment

Update: After sending 3 emails to support I finally received a response back asking several questions. I answered with the information I knew and then no response. In the meantime I was able to find the answer I needed after googling and looking through every page of the this app website. Now I have a beautiful display of lights. There for I’m moving my stars from 1 to 3. If support had been faster and more helpful I would have moved my stars higher.

Original post: Installed the lights 4 days ago and can’t get Twinkly to work. It continues to tell me to update the firmware. So I go into Twinkly and try only to get a message saying switch to WiFi interface. I try logging onto the this app WiFi only to tell me the password is wrong. The only password I can find for this app is Twinkly2019*. So unless you like one setting don’t buy! Over priced for that!!

App support answer the two emails my husband already sent you!

by Edytheawesome

My family and I just got this tree yesterday, and we love it (especially the rainbow setting)! I was wanting to create my own design, but Twinkly makes this really inconvenient. First off, the tree lights aren’t easily accessible. Instead of showing multiple sides, it shows the front and the lights on the other side are just blurred out. Another thing is that if you want it animated, you have to click the play button and then basically draw one dot at a time if you want it detailed. I feel as though it should be some kind of frame by frame animation style thing, or even simpler, making it a square. If you look at the presets, they are displayed in a square pattern with cubes. This would make creating a custom design much easier and I feel as though it should be implemented into Twinkly .

by Chutorr

These lights are amazing, the customer service is awesome. I have 12 sets of lights of various sizes, totaling over 4,000 LEDs. I get stopped by neighbors that tell me they love my lights and it brings joy to their day when they see them. I put them up in September for “fall” with fall colors and take them down around March around Easter. The ability to change the colors allows me to decorate for all the holidays. For anyone that loves holiday lights, these are amazing. Customer service is amazing as well, contacted them around 8pm on Sunday, They responded 4:30 am on Monday (they are in Italy) with a solution. I am impressed with all their products and services.

by St Loupien

We just love it. My kids are creating new patterns, my wife loves that she can make the lights more muted and traditional while the rest of us play with “color explosion”. Everyone gets what they want :) It has been so much fun and the tree itself is pre-wired really well with the connectors in the trunk itself! Just plug and play... literally. Only annoying part was opening up the branches as any other artificial tree. this app: for gen3 find a way to make it easier to fluff the tree up!

Overall, this is a next generation tree with upgraded LEDs, upgraded control schemes, upgraded wire harness and connectors, even an upgraded tree stand. We love it and hope it has the quality to stick with us for years to come.

by Akbsmith

I’ll admit...we were a little skeptical when we purchased these lights. We were fully expecting them to work of course, but not really expecting a WOW factor.
When we strung the lights around the tree and downloaded Twinkly , we crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.
We are absolutely speechless! The quality, the colors, the brightness, the customizations...it’s far beyond what we ever hoped for. The technology is awesome! Our friends and family have raves about our tree and we continue to love the lights just as much as the first night. We treat ourselves to a new look/effect most every day. How cool is it to have a whole new look of color scheme whenever you want?? It’s amazing! Kudos this app! We look forward to purchasing more strands soon!

by Rain User

These are the best lights I have ever used. I have been using standard white heavy cable lights for 20+ years. These lights will replace that way to light a tree. Very lightweight and easy to string. There is a learning curve to get Twinkly to work. For newbies skip mapping. Just use the preprogrammed offerings in Twinkly . The playlist is a great way to showcase the effects and you can custom the time each will run. I think these lights will pop more on light colored trees. Especially white. A white iridescent tree might really be a stand out. These lights will change the prejudice of artificial trees and make it more popular than ever to have a tree. The lights allow a holiday for every one whether you celebrate Christmas Hanukkah Kwanza or The Solstice. It’s the joy of bringing light inside. Happy holidays!

by Owlcityy.

I saw Twinkly last Christmas, and when we knew we wanted to get another Christmas tree this year, I knew I wanted a this app one! We ended up spending $500 for our tree—a huge price to pay—but so worth it!
I was able to easily set up the tree after figuring it out for a bit. I wasn’t able to connect our tree to our Wi-Fi, but our Wi-Fi is the newest and other things don’t connect to it. However, I was able to direct connect it. The options are SO cool and you can make all different color show options. It’s seriously the coolest thing ever.
I did have an issue connecting to Alexa—as did several people, if you look at the skill rating on Alexa. I reached out to the company and they were SO responsive and so helpful. They ended up fixing my problem and now the tree works with Alexa. Best. Purchase. Ever. Greatest customer service ever!!!

by Suvgrl97

When spending the amount of money on the this app tree, I was more skeptical on the actual tree rather than what it can do however, I was pleasantly surprised on how full and beautiful the tree is and it’s only 7.5 feet! I can only imagine how the 9 foot tree looks! Twinkly works with the lights in the tree and I’m sorry others are having problems... my tree and lights are perfect! Quick set up and quick WiFi set up as well! The only thing that was time consuming was the fluffing of the tree branches, after that, everything was quick and easy! You have to play with your unit to learn how to create your own design and make the lights dance to your music, you can also just activate the sequences patterns and add music which looks like the lights are in sync with the music you play. The best tree ever! Can’t wait to add this app lights all over my home, indoor and outdoor! Also can’t wait for future this app products! Awesome product!

by Sukotto42

…it’s great. However, I have lately not been able to apply my custom settings, which is pretty much a main feature of this app, no? I am forced into either using premade effects or a solid color. I build the effect, get it all perfect, save it. Looks great. BUT, when I press Apply in my custom effect, it just turns off this app entirely, and I then have to turn it back on. When I turn it back on, it’s not my effect, just back to the default again. I can apply all preset effects just fine, but not my own. I have reset the device, I have closed and reopened Twinkly and logged back in, I have re-mapped all the lights. Currently throwing my hands up in frustration with this issue, which I have to assume is app-based.

by Stealthtrickle

It’s funny how Twinkly got 3 5-star reviews spoiler the 5-star reviews were faked and made by the company not made by actual users. Twinkly doesn’t work it doesn’t connect to the internet it will only play one mode. I cannot change the mode there is so many things wrong. I can’t map out the tree because it’s not available for the newest version there is. This is by far the worst app I have ever came across it’s a waste of money to buy these so called “lights.” When spring comes along these lights will be in a bon fire and every neighbor and person I know will never buy these lights or download Twinkly because they will hear from me and all the people I’ve told that it does not work spend your money on something that actually works. So much for having a light up Christmas tree this year.

by Heyoni

You can’t use Twinkly unless you give it access to your location. A toy...needs to know where you are geographically. But not like, your rough geographical region (IP address); your precise GPS coordinates. Otherwise it won’t open.

I’ll probably return it unless my email to support reaches a sane human being.

/edit I understand Twinkly may need location services to see surround wireless AP’s but there are plenty of apps out there that will fallback to allowing the user to manually enter their wireless AP and that does not require location services.

After spending a few hours analyzing traffic between my devices and the internet and capturing all the web socket traffic, I still cannot validate for sure your claim that my location never leaves my device. That is because I found one query leaving my device after registration that is encrypted twice, once by the CA (which I can decrypt) and once by an unknown key.

I’ll check again to make sure this wasn’t coming from another service on my phone but until then, my review remains unchanged.

by Nerd No.3

Twinkly is making it impossible for me to enjoy my $500 Christmas tree. The lights are beautiful but I can’t get Twinkly to connect half the time or even play the selected light display I choose. Almost always the check mark to select the light display doesn’t even work. Trying to get help from the company via email but that’s taking too long. Also I notice that where there is an effect with an orange light, is not orange but green. Perhaps I got a defective tree and it won’t communicate with Twinkly or Twinkly is just that bad. I’m using a new iPhone so it’s not the phone.

by JustinOmaha

I hate to beat up Twinkly, because when it works it’s great. The problem is that some updates break the connection to your lights, and that’s very frustrating. I searched through their knowledge base (yikes it’s a total mess) to see how to reconnect, but couldn’t find an answer. Deleted the lights and I was able to re-add them and that fixed the issue. My biggest gripe is that we have some gen 1 lights (which we purchased last year), and the colors don’t match Twinkly . For example, the Halloween mode should be purple and orange. Gen 1 lights, they’re a bright blue and orange. This makes trying to match effects and colors impossible throughout the house.

by EtienneAs

One thing is for sure, this app lights updated our Christmas tree to 2.0 😃 It is really magical and nothing even comes close (definitely buying another 250 set next year for the bigger tree). Now onto the bad things. App is, well, not great, not terrible😉 The layout is quite unintuitive and effect “store” is very buggy. But what I find most lacking is the ability to use Homekit or Alexa or to at least be able to turn lights on/off remotely. I also wasn’t able to get microphone to work (I have a new version), it works great in preview, but after selecting an effect there is no longer mic function available. Hopefully, the above will be added/fixed until next year💪

by Liz In Az

Not sure what is going on with the this app app but after this latest update all of the designs I created are just gone. Completely gone. Plus there are designs added to my library that I did not download and add and it won’t let me delete it. What is going on? I’m mostly upset my designs have just been completely deleted. That is not cool! It took awhile to make those designs. Designs I had created for Christmas. 😔 Disappointed.

by Dmp812

I love the this app lights, but I do have some suggestions.

1) show us how to create text files that we can use to author color sequences, fades, timing, pauses, etc... that we can import into Twinkly . The custom editor isn’t all that great and for the tech savvy users, it is very clunky. This feature would allow total control over the this app lights for an awesome user experience.
2) allow custom effects to be saved to a this app server or even to iCloud account so they are never lost.
3) create a customer or end user submissions gallery in the effects store for item #1
4) add categories in the effects store with all the user submissions you are about to receive from items 1 and 3.
5) some of the preloaded effects like glow, have an obvious sequence end/begin glitch resulting in and observable and noticeable clunky end to the sequence that detracts from the enjoyment of the effect.
6) custom colors added to an effect are forgotten by the effect until you reselect the color, apply it, and have to once again save the effect under a different name.

by Wyldstang

My wife and I bought this tree as soon as they were on the shelves at Walmart. And as soon as we got it home my wife had to try it out. We set it up so it could be tested. It connected to WIFI immediately with no issues. And connects to our phone every time we open it.
It was put back in the box until yesterday. My wife put it back up again and everything works perfect again. I’m not sure why so many people are having issues with them. We have 1 TB internet and repeaters all over the house. So maybe that’s why it works so well. Either way it’s a great product!

by Timmytom93

Love Twinkly and the product. Setting it up was simple, finished in under 5 minutes! There support staff is incredibly friendly and helpful and answered all my questions quick and had honest answers as to the limitations and the timeframe as to when the issues I was having would be resolved! If your having any hesitation at all just go for it! It’s an amazing product!