HACKER Q&A
📣 LikelyABurner

Now That Phillips Is Enshittified, How Can I Run My Phillips Hue Lights?


For those of you that don’t know, the Phillips Hue app will soon be requiring you to sign up for an account to control Phillips Hue lights. Previously, they sold a Zigabee router specially for the use case of local control over WiFi, which is why I bought overpriced Hue lights over their cheaper competitor to begin with, but I guess that sweet data stream to make an AI based on light switching patterns was just too tempting.

The real kicker is they’re billing this as a “security requirement”, as though adding an additional cloud boundary to my threat model, all for a set of fucking light bulbs, could possibly increase my security.

I hate the future.

Now that my ranting is out of the way, how can I continue to control my lights without the proprietary app? I know they’re Zigabee and thus it’s an open standard so it should be possible, what are my options?

  👤 bombcar Accepted Answer ✓
You could look at https://www.home-assistant.io or if you're in the Apple ecosystem you could use the Home app which apparently can talk to Hue (for now).
👤 factorialboy
I've been using Google Assistant to control my Hue light setup for more than a year now.
👤 throwaway798214
Don't take this the wrong way... but I control my lights with mechanical switches that are installed to walls of my home. They don't need logins to any cloud services, in fact they don't even have internet.

They just work.

👤 pawelduda
Switch to HomeAssistant, I haven't opened the hue app once in months since migration
👤 VoodooJuJu
>I hate the future.

You chose this future.

But you can choose a better one: use mechanical switches. No cloud, no complexity, no need to pay homage to some malevolent centralized authority just to turn on a lamp.