Philips Hue app (by Signify)
As many of you might already know, Signify offers its users two ways of communicating with their Philips Hue lights. You can either use the bridge together with the Zigbee signal to turn your lights on. Or you could use Bluetooth to do the same as all new lights also have support for Bluetooth support.
Unfortunately, as of right now if you didn’t buy the bridge because you didn’t need it you will need to download a different app to use the Bluetooth functionality (Philips Hue Bluetooth). Many beginner users find the two apps confusing. So you just bought a couple of light bulbs that support Zigbee AND Bluetooth, which app do you need to download. Luckily this is about to change.
According to Hueblog.com, the Philips Hue development team is incorporating Bluetooth into the main app. This will start from the Philips Hue update to version 4.11 which will be released in the upcoming weeks/months. Hopefully, this also means that the Bluetooth app will get discontinued from the app stores to remove confusion.
Merging both of the apps will certainly offer advantages to their users. One advantage is that we can expect new features faster. As all developers can now put their full focus on improving one app with only one codebase instead of two. This also means the app only has to deploy once and will directly offer new features to either type of user.
Another big advantage is that upgrading to use the Philips Hue bridge is much easier. Lots of users start by using only the Bluetooth functionality but eventually move over to the bridge. With this new upgrade, you no longer have to download a new app and do the initial setup again.
To learn more about getting started with Philips Hue, please read my other article.
