Philips Hue App 4.16 (by @linusmimietz at Unsplash)
It has been quite a while since a new version of the Philips Hue app has been released with promising features. Since version 4.13, where they merged the Bluetooth functionality into the main app, only bug fixes have been released. Two days ago the Philips Hue App has been updated to 4.16 with the release message “Bug fixes and performance improvements”. Nevertheless, when you open the app you will find two new interesting things; new scenes and multiple bridges per account.
New scenes
In this release, three new scenes have been added to the Philips Hue app 😊. They are called: Miami, Rio, and Cancun. These scenes can be found in the Hue Scene gallery after clicking on a room and selecting “Hue Scene gallery”. When scrolling down you will see that these three scenes were added to the Party mood scenes. Personally, I really like the collars of the Cancun scene as it really reminds me of a cocktail party at sunset.
Adding multiple bridges
From this release onwards it is actually possible to connect multiple bridges to one email address. Up until this point, it was necessary to create a new Hue account for every bridge to control it with a remote connection. But now when you open the Philips Hue app and go to the settings tab you will find a new item called “My Account“. When selecting this you will see the message: “Multiple bridges per account using Hue Homes – Always out of home control”.
When you sign in you can connect your bridges but besides from that it still doesn’t seem to do anything different. I think this will be a very promising feature for the future, especially for people with multiple bridges. Hopefully, with this, Signify will fix the issue by using voice assistants and multiple bridges
Bug fixes & stability improvements
But as the actual release message already made clear some bugs fixes and improvements were also deployed. As with almost every update, bug fixes & stability improvements need to be done to keep the app up and running as you expect. This means coding bugs need to be crushed and old code needs to be thrown out of the window. Let’s hope we will see some nice performance improvements with this.
Via this site, you can check out the release notes published by Philips Hue.
