I know we already got another thread about this topic, but I wanted to highlight the stance of home assistant for this topic.
I really don’t see how you can argue with this post. Well, I can, but I really don’t want to think about it.
This always annoys me. How can a device you have purchased outright with certain functionality, have the terms of service changed after the point of purchase which then changes that usage of the device.
This seems like you could return for refund as the device is NOW not what you originally purchased.
Where does this end? We buy a car then 5yrs later they change the terms of service and if you don’t agree you don’t get the right to have tires on your car.
Why does your lightbulb need to connect to the internet at all? Automation does not require the cloud.
How else would you send spam or stage a DDOS attack? /s
Until something is legislated, this will continue to the end-user’s detriment.
I bought some Philips Hue bulbs In something like 2015 which have worked mostly fine ever since, but the control surface has become more and more intrusive over the years. I’m now relegating the bulbs to dumb use until they finally die.
I have completely swapped to just normal LED dimmer switches.
I live far enough out in the country that we get brown outs for less than an eye blink. Every fucking light bulb will shine bright like a diamond and there is no way to turn it off.
I’ve tried setting the ‘Power On’ Behavior but it just ignores it for these scenarios. It’s so maddening to wake up at 3 AM with every light on having paid hundreds for light bulbs I ‘own’ but can’t command.
It’s a good feeling knowing that my basic non-internet connected car can’t receive an OTA update to make me start paying a subscription to use something I already have just because the company decided they want more money.
I feel that at the very least, the customer in that case should be entitled to a complete refund of the product, regardless of whether they bought it 5 days or 5 years ago and regardless of the condition their device is in.
This should at least give some incentive to companies to not perform such sweeping changes to their terms of service and if they do, the customer can more easily remove themselves from the lock-in without taking a financial hit.
Just get a zigbee usb stick and ditch the hue bridge.
Yep! With zigbee2mqtt you even get bulb firmware updates too 😎
Could you tell me more, because I don’t know anything about this and would like to?
Thanks!
Just be aware you do lose some of the nice features the hue bridge has. They can be replicated in home assistant. But it’s a bit more hassle!
I’ve got a Hubitat and it works amazing. Local maker REST API and Google integration. Best of both worlds and no subscription.
Just did that. Most work was flashing the correct firmware onto the zigbee stick and now I have transferred almost all my Hue and Ikea lights. Except for those farthest way from the stick, they seem to be unable to join.
If anyone got a hint how to join these without moving the lights (screwed to the ceiling) or the stick (integrated in my server cabinet), I’d be grateful.
Capitalism is so exhausting. Can’t they just make a lighbulb that changes colour and leave it at that?
you could buy that - but you decided on philips cloud crap instead?
Philips was supposed to allow local only, that was a big draw over WiFi-bulbs that are 100% cloud dependent. If hue really is phoning home without permission, I’ll replace their hub with a zigbee dongle on my HA server.
I was always skeptical of Philips Hue because they seemed shy about using local only or even the fact that they’re just zigbee bulbs in their marketing. I ended up going with Sengled zigbee bulbs for myself, but I’ve always heard that Hue bulbs have the best brightness consistency and color. Also been noticing lately that the smart bulb market has been flooded with WiFi and Bluetooth bulbs, and there really isn’t a lot of choice left in the zigbee/local only market. Hopefully this change by Philips doesn’t lead to them dropping zigbee compatibility in future products, but them making moves like this doesn’t give me much faith.
I think the zigbee is part of their renowned reliability. Hopefully that’s true.
This is my chief worry with Thread. Zigbee is guaranteed to be local only, but if they switch over to Thread, the individual bulbs will be able to call home, even if they expose some of their functionality locally via Matter. With home assistant, one can probably configure their Thread Border Router to not allow internet access, but I have a suspicion a lot of supposedly local thread/matter devices will be designed with the assumption that they have cloud access and won’t function fully if firewalled.
When I bought it in February 2015 it didn’t require anything but a local network.
«Did you forgot to pay current month Light Subscription? We value your privacy. Please click here to renew your Light Subscription»
Connect your lamps to the cloud now. Because we value your privacy. Your lamps will not work without the cloud. But because we value your privacy, we collect neccessary diagnostic data such as
- Lamp on and off times
- Lamp color
- When the sexy-times preset is used
- How often you use your bathroom light
We will use this data to sell you Philips Avent baby bottles 9 months after sexy time, when the bathroom light started to be used in shorter intervals but more often as if by a pregnant woman who needed to pee more often but shorter, Philips oral shower when your bathroom light wasn’t on long enough to floss in the morning at least 3 times last week and a Philips vacuum cleaner if the lights never got bright enough so you’d see the dust buildup, thus you probably didn’t vacuum, disgusting little customer-person. All of that because we value your privacy.
Philips be like
Philips joining the companies of 2023 screwing over their customers. I don’t see this slowing down as they all get away with it
I guess I could keep buying them and sticking them on my zigbee network, but I should probably get off the Hue train before things get worse. The issue is that they’re just amazing bulbs and I can’t find a competitor with similar light and color tuning. Are there any comparable options yet?
Nanoleaf bulbs are great and their Essentials line work offline without an account.
I wouldn’t say they’re great; they’re adequate. There’s a lot of issues with the bulb firmware that still needs ironing out both with stability and feature set.
What features are you missing?
Basic features like turning a bulb on with a set brightness or color (if you’re lucky, you can turn on with a set brightness). No support for scenes (due to matter spec) which can lead to issues sending commands to light groups. And if you want to actually update bulbs good luck because it’s buggy as hell.
I have a nice mix of Hue and IKEA bulbs in my house, running on zigbee2mqtt. The IKEA bulbs are solid and I’ve had no major issues, but I did notice their smaller E14 bulbs had an annoying faint buzz sound when they were off, so they got swapped out for hue bulbs.
But as long as you’re running zigbee2mqtt or some other hub I would still consider hue bulbs as an option.
I don’t use Home Assistant but this is still saddening to see. Hue was always my favorite to recommend to tech folks because of the local API being pretty easy. I’m sure that will go too. Lifx was another favorite of mine but don’t work in my new house with multiple wifi APs with the same name. (I got a shitty little extender with a different name and use them in my basement.) Wiz is cheap but to my knowledge there’s no public API so I have no idea if it works with Home Assistant.
@JackbyDev @hillbicks Philips Hue works with the zingbee protocol. You can integrate every single IOT in #homeassistant or you integrate the hub. I use the internal #zigbee protocol with the #conbee usb stick and it work flawlessly. With zingbee you can use also other IOTs from different manufacturers like IKEA or osram or some Asian brands. Just have a look at the Homeassistant homepage for all existing integrations.
@JackbyDev @hillbicks sorry buddy, just saw this post from @homeassistant . Seems Philips is trying something bad: https://fosstodon.org/@homeassistant/111109147965184069
Yeah, idk how the Lemmy to Mastodon stuff works exactly but you’re replying to a comment I made on a thread about that Toot.
::no one liked that::
Would it not be possible to block this using firewall rules?
I’m blocking my bridge’s access to the internet right now, just in case they push an update for this. I never use the Hue app anyway.
Yup, same here. I guess a zigbee stick is next…
Hmm, maybe. Depends on the infrastructure they put up. If there is a separate domain for the telemetry, then you can block it. Still no guarantee that it still works though.
The app will need internet access to login though. That really is a cat and mouse game that is not worth your time I’d say.
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I guess “share a lot of information” means name+password of your wifi…
And as they’ll use mobile app, potentially a metric shit ton of more. Location, contacts, usage patterns, make/model of phone, other connected devices on your wifi and the list goes on and on. I’m not sure if they actually get everything they can like tiktok, but atleat theoretical possibility exists.
I liked having the full Hue ecosystem because it meant that I could tinker with HomeAssistant and the lights wouldn’t stop responding during restarts. I also already have a cloud account from the pre-HA days so that’s no big change for me but…
This is still a scumbag move.
My Hue lights continue to work when homeassistant is off, isn’t that a normal ZigBee feature? The switches are still connected to the lights.
I think he’s talking about having a bridge separate from home assistant vs using the zha integration. The former setup will let you control your lights when home assistant is down, the latter will not.
I just moved from the former to the latter and it’s life changing lol. Added bonus of moving to z2m is binding devices directly to other devices inputs, like switches and motion sensors.
Just FYI I use ZHA and the lights work with HA off.
I just got a Filohome (tuya) dual switch and used tuya-cloud cutter put ESPHome on it. When setup with ESPhome it will still work even if HA is unreachable ok WiFi is down. I never even downloaded their app, made an account, or signed in.
Note for anyone trying to do the same, the Filohome triple switch device in tuya-cloudcutter will work to load the initial boot firmware but you need to change the yaml config when you install ESPHome. If anyone wants the yaml file let me know.
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Your data, your choice. It’s Hue vs them.
Pulling an Apple without the infra
