Philips Hue owners are getting a hassle-saving upgrade to help them control their lights

(Image credit: Hue Lounge)

published 28 January 2022

I love my Philips Hue lights: they can set the right mood for a dinner party or make my flat resemble something from Neo-Tokyo, and because I rent my home they enable me to transform it without a lick of paint or an angry landlord.

The best Philips Hue bulbs, the most recent ones, don't need the Hue Bridge I had to buy in order to begin my Hue smart home adventures; they work via Bluetooth too. And that's great, but it's a bit of a pain because you can't use the standard Hue app to set them up: you need to use the separate Hue Bluetooth app instead. But not for long.

According to Hue Blog, the next update to the main Hue app will bring the Bluetooth features into it – so you'll be able to use one app instead of two, and be confident that you'll get your app updates at the same time as everyone else.

A useful update for any room with a Hue smart light

There are more changes to come. Hue Blog reckons that the separate Hue sync app is next for the chop: it hasn't been updated for eight months and the same Spotify syncing is already baked into the main Hue app, so there's not really any reason to keep it going. I'm all in favour of that: fewer apps make for an easier experience.

Having one app to rule them all is clearly a great upgrade for Philips Hue users. Now if someone could find a way to make all of my Hue bulbs work consistently with Apple's HomeKit so I don't need to switch to the Hue app at all...

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).