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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone done this that can compare it to the Hue app? I've had a few apps/light combinations, and the Hue app is by far the best I've used. It's compelling enough to suffer the beginnings of enshitification, but looking for a parachute when it gets to be too much.

I like Hue's rooms where all bulbs in the room are updated at the same time (seems like a basic thing), while others apps don't quite do this right. Applying a color change to the room vs each bulb in the room. I have one room with 3 separate light strips where the app "spans" a light patterns across each device. Again, not something other apps do without setting each individual bulb.

The Hue app works really well for me, and being unable to find an equally featured replacement keeps me on it

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If 100% of your devices are Hue and the automation it provides is enough, there really isn't a reason to switch.

But if you start adding a second brand like IKEA (their bulbs are a LOT cheaper than Philips) or Wifi stuff from Shelly, you either suffer the trap of 3+ separate apps or bite the Home Assistant bullet eventually.

I actually have both IKEA bulbs and Hue bulbs, but the appliance is different for both. I use the Hue bulbs where I want high quality lightning like the living room, kitchen, bathroom and office. I use the IKEA bulbs in places where I don't really care how good the lightning is; the hallways, toilet, garage etc. Automations for IKEA bulbs are in Home Assistant and for Hue they are in the Hue app.

IMO Home Assistant doesn't really do a good job with controlling the lights. It doesn't have the creative abilities to create or choose predefined "cool" scenes. Besides I don't want to know how much work I need to do in Home Assistant to re-configure the smart switches from Hue and their features.

In the end I can still control the Hue bulbs with Home Assistant if I want to. The Hue app doesn't prevent you from controlling the Hue bulbs from Home Assistant

The only fancy thing I need for my lights is what Apple calls "adaptive lighting", so that the colour temperature changes according to the time of day. The new IKEA Dirigera hub supports this too.

In the mornings and evenings all my lights are more yellow and bright white during the day.

The colour changing thing was cool for like 2 months, haven't touched it since (Except for my Hue Sync setup behind my TV)

If the hue app works for you then don't switch. You'll spend days learning and configuring everything and in the end it will not work reliably anyway.

You can group lights like this in Home Assistant.

You can also do it in ZigBee creating a group, if you just use the group in HA then you get the cascading "light 1 change, light 2 change, light 3 change, light 4 change", but with a ZigBee group it goes "light group blah change" and they all go at once.

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