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Comment by lynndotpy | Hacker News Reader

Coming as a very disgruntled and burned Philips Hue owner. Only four bulbs, but Philips is a name which leaves behind bile when spoken.

Ikea's Tradfri line was very refreshing for being entirely configurable with the wireless remote it comes with. You can connect multiple bulbs to one remote, without ever tinkering with an app or a hub or Home Assistant, etc.

Crucially, old TRADFRI communicated from the remote control to the bulb directly, so Ikea couldn't burn me the way Philips did. I'm hoping the new KAJPLATS end up working the same way.

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I'm curious why you are disgruntled with Philips Hue. They were quite honestly one of my happiest purchases, though I bought them when they were the only programmable color lights available to buy and I would probably get another model today.

Was it the dropping of support?

They started requiring an account to use the lights, and support started stating stating that the bulbs will not be usable without an account or the app, with the CTO stating intention to deprecate the local APIs entirely. This flies in the face of why I bought Hue. These are woes I thought I'd be "safe" from when I bought from Philips. I never wanted to create an account or use an app.

After spending time setting up Home Assistant, figuring out what I'd need to do to prevent a firmware update from hitting the bulbs, etc. I decided just to chalk the bulbs up to trash and sell them.

FWIW, they still seem to have not actually pulled the trigger on the account requirement and they've removed the "Starting soon" portion of the nag bar text in the Hue app (though it's still on the web page you get to when hitting "Learn more"). I do wish they would either get it over with or make it clear they're not actually going ahead with forcing accounts though.

That would be annoying and could well have pushed me off the platform. I guess I avoided that* because I downloaded the local mobile sdk for the hue lights early on, and coded up an app which met my peculiar needs, never looking back. I always figured the bulbs needed firmware updates to be pushed to them from the official app, so I just never initiated that, and so it never became an issue. I still regularly build the iOS app and use it to variously control the lights.

*Not to say that making ones own mobile clients is in anyway a for-everyone solution, but rather something only a picky mobile developer would do.

Do you have pointers about the firmware update part? Aren't they just Zigbee devices in the end that you can connect to any other Zigbee hub? I thought it's primarily required when using their bridge?

Not sure, I washed my hand of the whole thing a few years ago.

It is a shame really, because the Philips Hue hardware and software was superior to the Ikea ones (logarithmic vs linear dimming curves).

Matter does have the concept of Binding which is exactly this. Not sure if ikea implemented it, but the spec supports it!

It's because tradfri is zigbee. matter is in some ways an independent successor to zigbee.

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