Maybe you read the news: https://twitter.com/mysk_co/status/1704465531976224814
Hue will require accounts to control the lights. I was wondering if this only goes for the official apps (“who cares”), or goes a deeper level, so I asked support, to which they replied:
Hi there, thanks for reaching out. We are sorry you feel this way and value your feedback. We will be sure to pass this along to the relevant department. However, we do want to mention that eventually, it will be essential to have a Hue account to control the Bridge and/or bulbs themselves.
I’m torn. I spent a small fortune on Hue lights because of their reliability and features, did not use the official integrations much. If this goes through, it means every third party integration would break, making the lights pretty useless.
Is that really what they are saying, that they will drop local control? Not sure how they will implement this, I will just wait and see. I have a ton of them, and if so, I’ll move them to my Zigbee stick.
I think they’ve been moving in this direction for a while. I have a Chromebook and several Android phones and tablets, and I’ve ony been able to install the Hue app on one of them (some time ago) - with the others it’s “not available on this device”. I assume they’re shifting to some sort of webpage controller for the bridge.
But as @Mats789 says, it’s not clear how they are going to implement this.
I confess, I have opened an account - I bought a couple of the new contact sensors, and the instructions implied that you had to have one (not yet true). At the moment it offers no control interface with the bridge, just this:
While this is a really bad move on Signify’s part, it is unlikely that they want to get rid of the app or the local API of the bridge. (They obviously cannot change the nature of the actual bulbs being ZigBee devices.)
The social media people have a script for interactions such as this, but probably no or not much technical expertise. I would not read too much into it. There is a large eco-system of third-party apps that needs the local API. This is not a bridge* they are likely to burn, even if they now want to enforce data gathering via their accounts.
