I’ve been using Philips Hue white and color ambience lights around my house since they gained HomeKit support last fall, but the mobile apps that control the lights have never felt top notch. Earlier this week, Philips moved its Hue mobile apps to legacy status with a name change and icon tweak, and today Hue users are finally getting their hands on the latest and greatest Philips Hue apps for iOS and Android. The design improvements alone are dramatic and worth the wait, but Philips packs in some new features and tricks as well.
The old app fit in fine on iOS 7 and beyond, but it relied on a basement menu style which has fallen out of fashion and organization wasn’t as simple as it could be. The new Philips Hue app that replaces the old one has a much more modern look with a navigation bar for switching between lights and scenes or rooms and routines and more.
Aside from design, the old app also lacked great management for how it thought about lights in various rooms. Philips Hue lights work with Apple’s HomeKit framework, so I’ve instead relied on the excellent Home app to manage most of the experience, with the free OnSwitch app helping in some cases.
The new Philips Hue app better addresses grouped lights with a new feature called Rooms:
Rooms: The app allows you to control all the lights in a room or area at once, instantly. This feature also allows you to control the lights in a room through one voice command. For example, you can say “Set relax in the living room” to unwind after a busy day.
Philips is also getting better at automation with a new Routines feature:
Routines: The Routines feature allows you to set light schedules to support your daily activities, from the moment you wake up until you go to bed at night. The white light recipes in the Philips Hue app are designed to help you throughout the day with waking up, concentrating on work, reading, relaxing, or getting energized. The new Philips Hue white ambiance (available this spring) perfectly complements the routines feature by delivering every shade of white light.
The latest app includes new preset Scenes to try as well:
Scenes: The new app can extract the color palette from any picture of your choice and automatically select the five best colors to create a vibrant mood. You can also create your own unique scenes with more than 16 million colors and every shade of white light. New preset scenes in the app include spring blossom, savanna sunset, artic aurora and tropical twilight.
In addition to new Rooms and Routines features and updated Scenes, the new Philips Hue app features new widget options that combine rooms and scenes, and home and away mode let you automate turning lights on and off based on your location.
All in all, the brand new Philips Hue app will likely be a very welcome addition to Hue light owners. Controlling lights around your home with your iPhone is really fun, but it all starts with a great app experience and today’s release makes great improvements there.
The new Philips Hue app should be hitting the App Store soon; the legacy Philips Hue controller app is sticking around for now as well for users who prefer it. [UPDATE 11:30 am ET: The new app version is now available.]
Now’s a great time to get started with Philips Hue smart lighting or expand your current setup. Amazon is offering big discounts on previous generation Starter Kits, Home-Kit compatible bundles and bulbs.
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OK what am I missing here…I have the Hue lights and it does not work with HomeKit at all…
You may need to upgrade to the new hub which adds support for HomeKit to any existing hue lights.
http://store.apple.com/xc/product/HJE22VC/A
You need the new bridge
How long have you had them, some older models don’t support HomeKit, and you’ll need the Bridge to get it working with your network and HomeKit
Sounds like you have the old, 1st generation Bridge that DOESN’T work with HomeKit.
I am planning to get the Hue rather sooner than later but I was hoping for the new… uhm, version of it? Hopefully, that will be soon! And with that new app, everything looks more and more appealing! Is there any indication that they are working on new models/etc?
The new model was released months ago. Are bridge, new lights, new Hue Dim, etc…
There is a new white bulb coming that has different white temperatures. From what I’ve seen the new colour bulb is a bump slightly in brightness and a slight rebrand on the box.
Yesterday my Hue App was updated, changing the icon to grey colour but nothing else in the app apparently is changed. Reading the post i wasn’t able to understand if the new App will be coming in the next days or if has been just released, and in this case, if users should download a totally new app. At the moment my App name is “philips Hue gen 1” which i don’t know if this is the legacy name
If you read the release notes for the update which renamed it to gen 1 you’ll see that this is now the old legacy version. You will need to download the new app separately when it becomes available.
Can’t wait for the new release. Seems Philips have listened and addressed issues/problems that needed to be fixed. Nice work!
HomeKit only works with the rounded square bridge, it looks like the AirPort Express access point, and has a button on top of it. The old bridge is round, and does not work with HomeKit.
This is a good App, been beta testing it for a while now and a lot of effort went in to making this App great. There are also a whole host of new features to come in future updates.
It still does not address one of the main complain I have about this app: it is not compatible with other non-philips HomeKit devices and bulbs. I have some lamps that simply cannot accommodate Hue bulbs because of size or type light I need. SO I have to rely on other HomeKit devices. Sad to see that this update does not solve this. Home and Huemote (soon to support HomeKit I was told) are a better choice.
Why would Phillips support other Home Kit bulbs? Home kit is an apple initiative which Hue works with, the Phillips app is for Hue, not Home Kit.
The purpose of this app is to drive the user to purchase more Phillips bulbs, and retain existing Hue customers, not any old bulb that happens to work with Home Kit. You can’t really complain about a manufacturer producing an app for their hardware and not spending the money on development time to support competitors hardware, from which is makes no revenue at all.
I use non-philips bulbs through out my house and the hue app works fine with them.
I’m upset that in the new app I can no longer group lights together to match the same color when creating a scene. Why would they remove that feature…???
I guess we’re supposed to use “scenes” to adjust groups of lights.
Still haven’t seen this hit the app store yet, anyone else ?
Found it using a direct link – https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/philips-hue-gen-2/id1055281310?mt=8
Gah! I’m annoyed with the new app! Nicer layout, yes, but no importing your former scenes?!?! And I can’t select individual bulbs for actions like “Arriving Home” or “Waking Up”, only able to select an entire room? Am I right, or do I just not know how to use the app?
It’s cool that there is now a better stock app – competition revives the market.
Let’s go into that – iConnectHue for the iPhone has light groups since about 3 years. Since then, you can create and – also – edit presets (similar to scenes) per group. When you edit them, iConnectHue will update them whereever possible – even on your switches!
There’s an iPad version, iConnectHue HD – even with multitasking support! With “Watch Plus”, you will be able to control all your rooms from your wrist, with just a few finger tips.
Annoyed by boring static colors? iConnectHue can upload animations to your bridge! It doesn’t require your iPhone to be turned on, and – if you want to – can even upload animations to your hardware switches.
Compare it, try it:
http://iconnecthue.com/?page_id=19#comparison
The new Gen 2 BLOWS!!! If you were a loyal and active customer, bought early, made many “Scenes”, and were really happy with your product…
To bad so sad…. we are going to rewrite the app and to NOT give any migration functionality. Shame on Phillips for being so lazy.
The ONLY positive thing I can say about Philips now that that at least they left the gen 1 version up there to download after you find that the new one does not preserve ANY of your scenes.
I would love to have explored the functionality of the gen 2 app but I am unwilling to recreate my existing scenes to do so. Since the previous app did not have rooms, just scenes, it would seem to have made a lot more sense to import all existing scenes into a default room and let you manipulate from there.
We will use Gen 1 until Gen 2 is actually fixed or until we find a decent competitor, which ever comes first.
Dramatically improved? I can’t imagine how it use to work because this app constantly acts up and refuses to change the bulb colors!