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Is the Philips Hue Ecosystem 'Collapsing Into Stupidity'? (rachelbythebay.com) 194

Posted by BeauHD from the platform-decay dept.
The Philips Hue ecosystem of home automation devices is "collapsing into stupidity," writes Rachel Kroll, veteran sysadmin and former production engineer at Facebook. "Unfortunately, the idiot C-suite phenomenon has happened here too, and they have been slowly walking down the road to full-on enshittification." From her blog post: I figured something was up a few years ago when their iOS app would block entry until you pushed an upgrade to the hub box. That kind of behavior would never fly with any product team that gives a damn about their users -- want to control something, so you start up the app? Forget it, we are making you placate us first! How is that user-focused, you ask? It isn't.

Their latest round of stupidity pops up a new EULA and forces you to take it or, again, you can't access your stuff. But that's just more unenforceable garbage, so who cares, right? Well, it's getting worse.

It seems they are planning on dropping an update which will force you to log in. Yep, no longer will your stuff Just Work across the local network. Now it will have yet another garbage "cloud" "integration" involved, and they certainly will find a way to make things suck even worse for you. If you have just the lights and smart outlets, Kroll recommends deleting the units from the Hue Hub and adding them to an IKEA Dirigera hub. "It'll run them just fine, and will also export them to HomeKit so that much will keep working as well." That said, it's not a perfect solution. You will lose motion sensor data, the light level, the temperature of that room, and the ability to set custom behaviors with those buttons.

"Also, there's no guarantee that IKEA won't hop on the train to sketchville and start screwing over their users as well," adds Kroll.

What has your experience been with the Philips Hue ecosystem? Do you have any alternatives you recommend?
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Is the Philips Hue Ecosystem 'Collapsing Into Stupidity'? More

Is the Philips Hue Ecosystem 'Collapsing Into Stupidity'?

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  • It was dumb from the beginning (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stooo ( 2202012 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:06AM (#63880343) Homepage

    >> Is the Philips Hue Ecosystem 'Collapsing Into Stupidity'?
    No it is not.
    It was dumb from the beginning to connect all lightbulbs to the internet.

    • smart = dumb...moronic. 'nuff said.

    • Re:It was dumb from the beginning (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mrbester ( 200927 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:23AM (#63880375) Homepage

      They are keen to stress that you don't need to give internet access to the range (so there's no phoning home. Yet) and things will keep working just fine. Except you'll be needing to set up an account before you can use anything, but they are being coy about how something that doesn't need internet access to operate is able to confirm an account has been set up on a remote server.

      They are also keen to stress this account creation is all about security of the devices, but then admit the data is going to be used to send you marketing spam, which you have to explicitly opt out of. This is contrary to GDPR (or equivalent) in many countries and a Dutch company wouldn't know about such things...

    • Re:It was dumb from the beginning (Score:5, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:33AM (#63880381) Homepage Journal

      The point is that you didn't have to connect Hue lightbulbs to the internet, they worked locally with a Hue Hub.

      I know it's Slashdot tradition not to RTFA, but it does mention that in the summary.

      Anyway, there is a solution. Make your own hub and everything is done locally under your control again. Integrates with Home Assistant. https://diyhue.github.io/ [github.io]

      Before buying any product like this, make sure that there is at least an open source hub/app you can use them with. Ideally get ones with Tasmota open source firmware support too. The good news is that if Philips does enshitify Hue, there will be some cheap and open enough bulbs coming to a bargain bin near you.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        "Anyway, there is a solution. Make your own hub..." ...that uses the Hue hub to provide Hue support. Genius!

        "Before buying any product like this, make sure that there is at least an open source hub/app you can use them with."

        Of course, you cannot know whether those open source solutions work before you buy the product. You can, however, confirm that the open source hub you linked to does not replace the Hue hub.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by slaker ( 53818 )

          I always see people advocating for using Rpi devices as smart home controllers, but the base unit plus all the transceivers needed pushes the price up substantially from just a $50 Pi.

          Hubitat makes the Elevation, which is a $100 smart home controller the size of a pack of smokes that is more or less a do-everything smart home controller. It doesn't rely on internet connectivity and it has automation controls that let it do some neat stuff by for example monitoring when a particular MAC address is joined to

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          You seem to be confused. These devices use the Zigbee protocol, they don't connect to your WiFi. If you control the hub, you control the devices. No internet connection required, no forced firmware updates. You just need a Raspberry Pi and Zibee hat. Home Assistant gives you control via your phone or a locally hosted web page.

          You can easily find out which products support open source firmware and hubs before buying, just do a Google search. The most popular firmware is called Tasmota.

    • Re: It was dumb from the beginning (Score:4, Insightful)

      by beelsebob ( 529313 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:00AM (#63880401)

      The point theyâ(TM)re making was that they *werenâ(TM)t* connected to the internet before. Instead only the local network. If you wanted, you could then use a HomeKit hub to control them through the internet, but you didnâ(TM)t have to if you didnâ(TM)t want to, and even then it was only the HomeKit hub (which generally has decent security, and a large company providing patches) that talked over the internet, not a series of lowest cost possible lightbulbs.

      The update now requires you to connect the lightbulbs to the internet.

      • Right, the slow and steady gait towards totally driving your customers insane. I see similar frustration with iphone/ipad. I never "login", because I don't remember my password and it's a pain to look it up, and because it's not mandatory or necessary for operation. But I was asked 5 times in rapid succession login during the time I tried open my Microsoft Authenticator and swipe my finger so that I could authenticate the laptop at work. It was like 1 to 2 seconds between each request by Apple to login.

        T

    • Re:It was dumb from the beginning (Score:5, Funny)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:15AM (#63880423)

      Intelligently Designed Internet Of Things Systems are made for their acronym.

    • The benefit of the hue system is that the thing WASNâ(TM)T connected to the internet. It was a local system running independently of your wifi and internet. Thats what made it sucks way less than competing systems. Now it sounds like they have removed this âfeatureâ(TM) so theres less of a reason to stay with hue

    • Re:It was dumb from the beginning (Score:5, Informative)

      by dasunt ( 249686 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @07:42AM (#63880543)

      It was dumb from the beginning to connect all lightbulbs to the internet.

      Philips Hue used to use Zigbee, not wifi. It was a local wireless standard (hence the hub).

      This is more like Logitech deciding that bluetooth mice should suddenly be wifi mice.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjwest ( 948274 )

      Philippa Copleston-Warren. is person worth a search on - she posted revenge porn using home automation products in the uk.

      • That was entertaining, LOL she certainly has a love hate relationship with home automation and those who use such things.

  • Not going for full integration. (Score:3)

    by Chas ( 5144 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:47AM (#63880389) Homepage Journal

    I've had a hodge podge Hue system for about 3 years now.
    It works.
    Kinda. (When you can't control a bulb in a lamp becuase the signal won't go 10 feet and pass through the paper lampshade? Problem.)
    I initially did it because I had to rearrange a couple walls in my home, putting light switches on the far side of the room from the entrance.

    However, when I sell this home, i'm stripping it all out (Kinda have to, as Hue's setup isn't terribly mobile or transferable.
    Between that and the semi-regular need for full system (from your internet gateway down) reboots...

    Nice twoy. Nothing more.

  • All will be Apple (Score:3)

    by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:09AM (#63880415)

    Hand the market to Apple faster why don't ya :/

    • Apples make really bad light bulbs.
      Also, they get rotten, stink, and fall on your head. Ask Newton.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AvitarX ( 172628 )

        Apple loves lock in, but they use it to make the UX better.

        I don't have apple products, but it's pretty easy to see this.

        I suspect this company will redo a decent UX (it's definitely flawed as evidenced by third party apps available to control it), make it lock in, and also be really really bad.

      • Apple doesn't need to take over the light bulb just yet to destroy Hue's margins, if Hue can't differentiate because they make people not use their software they force themselves to compete on a commoditized homekit bulb market.

      • I had an apple I left on a shelf for months once as a teen, it certainly never stank.... though it did become a hotel for fruit flies.

    • Re:All will be Apple (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Arnonyrnous Covvard ( 7286638 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:51AM (#63880455)
      They're trying to be Apple, the mother of all lock-ins, so you can keep your snark. Apple isn't the solution, it's the source of the problem.

      • Cargo cult design, just copy what Apple did and the gods will be pleased.

      • They're trying to be Apple except they don't have account syncing, email, messaging, cloud storage and one of the most popular mobile platforms in the world as well as unbeatable brand image for privacy. Yes, I know homekit automations don't work offline, but people accept way more retarded shit from Apple than "Philips". They don't have a reality distortion field.

  • Automating the bulb has a bunch of drawbacks, like leaving you with a switch that can turn off all your automations. Get yourself some smart switches, like the Leviton ones in the US or the Lightwave ones in the UK. Neither requires internet to work. Both in fact just directly connect to HomeKit.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mccalli ( 323026 )
      I've done this for most (long-term Lightwave user) but there's still a disadvantage - colour. I would be really interested in a smart switch that also allowed me to select the colour of the bulb.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Replacing switches is a delightful solution for renters, rentals often benefit the most from Hue bulbs.

  • Home automation is not worth the cost (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @07:16AM (#63880479) Homepage

    I've been interested in home automation for almost two decades now, and have played with a few technologies including X10 and Insteon. I've also written a bunch of software that talks directly to Insteon networks.

    The first problem with home automation is that all the off-the-shelf stuff now wants to talk to the internet, and that's terrible. The included software is also often buggy. I installed a home energy monitoring system that records power usage down to the individual branch circuit level, and the software that came with it would lag to the point of being unusable within about two months, and the database would hit about a gigabyte in size within that time. Their solution was that I should pay a monthly fee to have it upload my energy data to a cloud service. I wrote my own software for it with a focus on performance and space efficiency and it works great with a decade of data and only takes about 100 MB of space per year. Every other option on the market only included a black box that forced you to upload your data to the cloud.

    Secondly, the local networking is often broken. I've had a webcam for monitoring a 3D printer, and networked temperature sensors and such that are supposed to work locally to my phone, but if you block their connection to the internet at the firewall they stop working or the app can't find them. It's frustrating. The apps are also just garbage, constantly logging you out and forcing you to login again when you just want to take a quick glance at the status of your 3D print or something.

    Given all those problems, I have no confidence in the security of a smart lock for your front door or your garage door, which is designed to work over the internet so you can unlock your door while you're on vacation on another continent.

    Finally, don't get me started on always-on smart home speakers and robot vacuums that map the contents of your home and upload them to their servers so they can sell the data. You want these devices listening and recording the most intimate moments of your life? No thank you. This is dystopia and I want no part of it.

    • I'm not worried about the security of my internet enabled smart garage door opener. It needs a regular power cycle to work at all. If someone wants to break into my garage to reboot my cloud garage door opener so they can hack into it to break into my garage they are welcome to.

      • is your garage stand alone? or does it connect directly to your house? Garage's that connect to your house are a thieves dream, because they can break into the garage, then close the garage door, then they have ample time to break into the home, unobserved from the outside. Just a thought.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jddj ( 1085169 )

      For your camera, try a Raspberry Pi and Octoprint (if you're not using it already). The camera stack supports Raspi cams, as well as many standard USB web cams.

      I can access mine remotely and directly, and control the printer (mainly to stop it if a tangle) - through the web page, not an app - by tunnelling via SSH and punching it through my router. I use keys only for the SSH connection - not passwords. I do password-protect the Octoprint UI, as a belt-and-suspenders approach to securing it.

      No dumb-ass clou

    • 'monitoring a 3D printer'

      Yeah, we should ask the team that developed OctoEverywhere to do a HA app. It would be free/paid, but their stuff does work. For me at least.

    • I've been interested in home automation for almost two decades now, and have played with a few technologies including X10 and Insteon. I've also written a bunch of software that talks directly to Insteon networks.

      The first problem with home automation is that all the off-the-shelf stuff now wants to talk to the internet, and that's terrible.

      You did all that research and missed zwave, zigbee, tasmato, and esphome?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      For home automation stuff, look for things that support the Tasmota open source firmware. If you search AliExpress for "tasmota" you will find loads of compatible devices. Many Western brands can be converted Tasmota too.

      You can also just buy modules and built your own. Basically an ESP microcontroller board and the sensors of your choice.

      You can use it for all your needs. Webcams, temperature sensors, light switches, power monitors, door locks...

      For smart speakers, you can build them from a Raspberry Pi. N

  • Disclaimer: I've never purchased anything from this site, but it looks like it has decent products that don't require Internet access to work: Cloud Free [cloudfree.shop].

    • Looks like every other trashy bulb that has Tasmota loaded on it.
      I want Hue light because they look really good. I have tried a bunch of Tasmota/Zigbee LED bulb and they werent as bright, the colors not as good, and they are fragile. Put them in a lamp and knock that lamp over, they die. The Hue bulb is still going.
  • Thats why you run a system like Home Assistant, and choose devices like z-wave that do not require this nonsense.

    • It didn't require this nonsense. Philips changed how it works. Did you read the article?

      • Hi, This is /., no one reads articles, they just burst out trying to insult others and say stuff about how superior their thought process is. ... if I had a nickel for every time I read someone say they had coded their own, rather than rely on the crap code that ________ (insert widget name here) came with, I'd have a new tesla S model paid in full, every year.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )
      My only argument is that I, as a "techy" person, was able to get HA up and running with a couple days work. It wasn't at all intuitive, and was a bit of a struggle. There is no way in hell I would recommend something like that to anyone who isn't really tech savvy. That's the beauty of things like Wink, Hue, etc. they are supposed to just plop down and work, which they did for the most part.

  • Plenty of FOSS support for Hue devices (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Wuhao ( 471511 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @07:47AM (#63880557)

    Hue owners:

    Go get a Zigbee dongle, and plug it into something that can run Home Assistant and diyHue. A raspberry pi will be fine. In Home Assistant, install Zigbee2MQTT and the diyHue integration. One by one, delete your lights from the Hue bridge, which will make them available to pair with Zigbee2MQTT, which will present them to HA and diyHue. Now you can pair all your favorite third party Hue apps with diyHue, which presents the same API as an official Hue bridge. Each of these projects are open source -- diyHue and Home Assistant are Apache-licensed, and Z2M is GPLv3. None require active Internet access or cloud-based logins.

    For apps, you have a variety of options which you can find on Play or App Store. Also, diyHue and Home Assistant both have some native webapp functionality including light control, plus Home Assistant has its own ecosystem surrounding it that you can find apps and such for.

    As a bonus, you also gain the ability to integrate with DIY solutions -- for instance, you can buy long reels of light strip (like SK6812-based RGBW strips) that are easily a match for what Philips puts out, with the added capability of individually-addressable LEDs, at a fraction of the price, with more selection in PC board color and IP rating and LED density, and connect them up with cheap ESP8266 controllers. You can now also integrate with tons of other stuff, and link controls for all of it within Home Assistant.

    • Got a solution that is less jank? Having a USB stick on a computer is a great way to break that USB stick.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Wuhao ( 471511 )

        There's Ethernet-attached Zigbee coordinators you can get, and those will also work with Z2M.

  • IKEA Dirigera hub (Score:4, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @08:27AM (#63880681)

    Four out of five star rating. Pretty good. That means IKEA will be discontinuing it real soon now.

  • Got a few wiz bulbs. These are fun. You can control them by sending udp packets.

  • I find it funny (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DarkRookie2 ( 5551422 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @08:37AM (#63880717)
    That these people are all so concerned about them being local only,
    and in the next breath talk about how they have it hooked up to Samsung, Apple, Google, Amazon, or whoever for VA.
    What is the point of bitching about something being local only? You gave that up for voice control.

    • Re:I find it funny (Score:4, Informative)

      by dasunt ( 249686 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:48AM (#63880889)

      That these people are all so concerned about them being local only,
      and in the next breath talk about how they have it hooked up to Samsung, Apple, Google, Amazon, or whoever for VA.
      What is the point of bitching about something being local only? You gave that up for voice control.

      HomeAssistant has an offline-voice mode, if you are concerned about privacy.

      I use it without voice control at all, since my setup is pretty simple. For the few awkward lights I have, I just use a cheap zigbee button or the HA app on my phone - and even that's rarer, since my automation is more along the lines of "turn these lights on at dusk, and off at 10PM".

  • And block all requests the HUE lights and hub make to external sites. Its crazy that HUE and Nanoleaf (an even shittier less reliable light/app ecosystem) "needs" to connect to multiple external sites every minute.

    Updateshittery surprise EULA problem solved.

    PS
    Like people on here are saying,quite often it does takes more time to pick up the smartphone, unlock it, open the app, wait for the app to respond-often it seems to be searching for someting, tap the room, tap the light, and tap ON/OFF than the 5 seco

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Wuhao ( 471511 )

      At a guess, being fairly familiar with the Hue API, I suspect that the hub will not be responsible for enforcing the login requirement since they'd have to make a breaking change to the entire third-party ecosystem they've built up. They've already found it challenging to drive adoption of the v2 API, which did not have this kind of sleaze, and introduced a lot of actual improvements. The bulbs themselves are Zigbee-based and do not do IP at all. The problem is that Philips still controls the phone app. Thi

  • You can just use the switch. You are just wasting money, light bulb apps have not improved your life.

    • It's worse than that. Who wants to have to administer all of this crap in their house? I can barely be bothered to set the clock on my microwave.

  • This situation demonstrates why some people want “cloud optional” or “cloud required” labelling on products, with no “oh the cloud is now required”, in some future update. We don’t know how companies our using our data and the need for the cloud makes the solutions useless for anything off-grid or when the connection to the ISP fails.

  • A nation named "Sue" (Score:3)

    by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:40AM (#63880865) Journal

    Talk to lawyers. Add a computer to something, suddenly there's tons of potential to get sued. Bugs, security holes. If ladder companies could flip a switch and stopping you from using their ladder until you pasted warning sticker #73 on it, they would have no choice.

  • Hue is first and foremost a standalone solution that works just fine without an app. You need an app to set it up but not to use it.

    It is perfectly possible, in fact preferable, to use Hue devices without the Hue app. I wouldn't know about annoying EULAs in an app I've never used. There are better solutions for the app,there are not better solutions for the bulbs.

    The hub, though, has always been a POS.

  • I have a box of 30 year old X10 stuff. (Score:3)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @12:24PM (#63881275) Homepage
    I bet if I dust them off and plug them in they will still work as well (which isn't saying much) as they did when new. No FUCKING internet connection needed. Will any of these protocols and products be able to do the same in 30 years?

  • I've seen how this ends (Score:3)

    by NotEmmanuelGoldstein ( 6423622 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:25PM (#63882021)

    ... yet another garbage "cloud" "integration" ...

    Another appliance company that will decide your account isn't valuable, or you haven't upgraded to new appliances, and so will delete it: Your appliances can't log-in, so you can't change the settings. Some brands even disable remote on/off.

    Of course, you can create a new account and install your settings (cloud services don't pull the current configuration from the appliances), and three months later, another new account. I've seen how this ends: The surprise being, enshittification wasn't adopted earlier.

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