It’s not just immoral, this should be straight out illegal. Simple as that.
Selling hundreds of dollars of device to someone then taking hostage the usability of said device afterward…
All this probably to either snoop insane amount of data they want to sell, or to sell a shitty subscription that nobody asked for…
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I am a bit confused by this.
As much as I know Hue already supports Matter and Matter should run locally.
So how can they force you to create a cloud account ?
I don’t have Hue myself and don’t know much about Matter yet but this announcement and Matter support seem conflicting to me
They can force cloud on you by locking the option to get the Matter code so it can only be paired via Matter if you have such an account
You only bought payed for the hardware but at the same time Philips Hue has full (and only) control over the software part on your devices. If your bulbs ending up being connected to a bridge via the internet they (who? hue) can do anything they want with the hardware you payed for. 
Owning a device completely requires research up-front but comes with many benefits as rolling the own software on the device, extending functionalities or simply keeping it up to date even years after the manufacture abandoned the device. 
The right to repair is something you don’t have if you only pay for hardware which are black boxes and (when connected to the internet) could be deactivated/degraded any moment by bad actors (typically manufactures). 
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I don’t know if anyone is interested, but I try following it up with questions what the improvements actually are.
The answer I got:
With a Philips Hue account, you’ll get insights and control over every user and third-party application that has access to your Philips Hue system.
Additionally, with the added access to user permissions, you can limit permissions for a certain user, preventing your children or house guests from deleting your Home settings or accessories, for example.
I told them I already have control (it requres a physical button press) over these things. Looking forward for the next reply.
They can force cloud on you by locking the option to get the Matter code
So Hue gets a Matter certificate even if they force me to use their cloud? Also, I still need to use the Hue app to setup everything and I can’t have one single app for everything?
But still that hardware is Matter certified and needs to meet some requiremnts for that. I had in mind that one of those requirements is local access and interoperability with other Matter devices. If they force me to use an account, they don’t meet those requirements in my optionion.
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They can for sure get around that by burying a “local Matter setup” option deep in the apps settings so no-one finds that but it’s there
In an ideal world I wouldn’t even need the Hue app, I should be able to setup everything using any other “Matter-app” out there. Not sure if that is also part of what Matter wants to do.
It should be like that for devices that have a Matter pairing code, but Hue Bridges don’t have such a physical code, thus locking Matter behind the account is easy for Signify
Funny how they want to turn this into a “benefit”.
Our local electrical utility has offered us free* Honeywell Thermostats.
*The catch? The utility can raise our A/C temperature in the summer to “reduce demand”. And we won’t know it until we start sweating. Set it to 75° and a couple of minutes later the utility will reset it to 80°.
No cloud sh** here. Never.
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That’s becoming more common in the US, we have that here in Colorado as well but they give you a Nest or a Honeywell for the job. At least you have the chance to opt-in for it so you are fully aware of the downside before you pull the trigger.
In the end I think that locking the “latest and greatest” feature of Matter behind some sort of paywall or privacy relinquishment is why they are doing this. Like so many companies with products are doing these days, they want that monthly revenue rather than the billions in sales being enough. Car companies, who are slowly reversing this due to massive blowback, have been charging a monthly fee for the privilege of using Apple CarPlay or even seat heaters, you stop paying and you stop having a warm caboose on cold days. Subscription fatigue is real but companies who were slow to adopt this idiotic subscription model in the early days are trying to bring that to market now when people are already sick of it. Remember “cutting the cord” for cable? That’s now a thing for all these streaming services that cost you many times more than cable ever did and people are cancelling recurring subscriptions rapidly now.
In any case, Hue is obviously greedy - they either want a paywall, they want to charge for Matter or they want to sell your data - all of these just say “go local” and be done with Hue’s hubs (which I bet go away with proprietary tech soon).
By the looks if it you can be also matter certified and have all features of a device only in the manufactures (cloud) app
Feature Comparison Table
MINIR4M uses Matter as its connectivity standard, however, it doesn’t mean that all platforms will have the same features. Let’s take a look at the summary table provided by SONOFF to understand the differences when using MINIR4M on different Smart Home platforms. […]
They said they want to do it better this time and repeat old mistakes again
For what it’s worth, I regularly get OTA updates for my Philips lights through Zigbee2mqtt.
As long as they are committed to continuing to provide these — and to Zigbee in general (or Matter in the future), I’m happy enough.
I really hope that remains true, though, because in my experience these bulbs have the best spectrum coverage as white-light, and the best RGB too (a lot of others really, really fail at making a nice orange, never mind anything like giving results similar to what one would expect from traditional sRGB monitor colors). And they are more reliable than any other brand I’ve found.
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Yes, I settled on hue/wiz lights because of this reason. Went with Hue because I don’t want wifi (with wiz). Both brands are made by silicon labs and they really do have the best color range. Especially orange. All other brands tended to make orange look like soft white.
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Totally agree. Hue bulbs are the best color bulbs on the market IMHO and some of the better white bulbs too. I am not going to stop using Hue, just their hub is blocked from the Internet for now with the Zigbee migration on my schedule.
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Yes, hue bulbs are the only ones with a full rgb spectrum, but they are really expensive (especially gu10 and e14 ones) my fallback atm is ledvance, their E27 bulbs are very cheap (currently 13€ on amazon) and they have a decent spectrum
might not be the correct place for this but couple of questions regarding migration to ZHA before I even start to consider it:
Are there any restrictions/limitations to the number of lights you can pair to a ZHA network compared to the 50 max for a Hue hub?
Do hue lamps act as routers on a zigbee mesh?
- There is not a general “hard” limit on how many devices a ZHA mesh can have, but most coordinators only support ~32 direct child devices, which are devices directly connected to the coordinator, e.g not over a router, and each router is then able to have multiple sub-devices connected to it.
- Yes, Hue bulbs act as routers and work really well in ZHA
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Hey Hypfer, I really like this, thank you!
I am trying it but when I apply a preset, it only switch to the first color and then stay on thet color, not moving across different colors, am I doing something wrong ?
I believe you need to set transition seconds, that’s what I did and it works fine.