Philips has updated the Hue app for the HomeKit-connected smart lights and lightbulbs, which will enhance the overall experience of users.
On April 28, Philips announced the update for Android and iOS Hue app, which brings users a fresh design and a more intuitive interface. The app now includes a new feature called "Rooms," which will allow users to group together lights in a room and control all of them at once.
The update also adds another feature called "Routines," which can be used for setting light schedules. The "Scenes" tool of the app will automatically select five most vibrant colors from a sample picture and create a custom lighting scheme. Users will be able to tweak the colors picked by the tool.
The "Home & Away" feature brings complete peace of mind because users can still control the lights even when they are away. With this setting, the app turns the lights on or off based on the users preference and device's location.
The new "Widgets" feature allows for easy and quick controlling of the Philips Hue lights.
"Quick to set up and even quicker to access from drop down menu on the home screen, you can have up to 10 widgets that combine multiple rooms and scenes at once, giving you easy access to your favorite light settings," says Philips.
The latest update to the Hue app is a big improvement as many users complained of the initial version of the app.
"It's amazing really... a massive global corporation like Philips apparently can't hire programmers who actually know how to create a decent app! After all these pointless updates, they STILL can't figure out how to make the Alarms & Timers page scroll smoothly. God help you if you have more than one page of alarms and timers like I do... scrolling that page up or down is literally painful to watch! It lags and sticks and stutters," complained one user.
Customers can download the Hue app for iOS and Android free from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store respectively.
The iOS version of the Hue app is compatible with iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch running on iOS 8.0 or above. The app weighs 57 MB and supports a number of languages such as English, Dutch, Czech, French, Japanese, German, Italian and more.
The Android version of the app weighs 26 MB and requires Android 2.3 or above.
