Why does your lightbulb need to connect to the internet at all? Automation does not require the cloud.

Until something is legislated, this will continue to the end-user's detriment.

I bought some Philips Hue bulbs In something like 2015 which have worked mostly fine ever since, but the control surface has become more and more intrusive over the years. I'm now relegating the bulbs to dumb use until they finally die.

It's a good feeling knowing that my basic non-internet connected car can't receive an OTA update to make me start paying a subscription to use something I already have just because the company decided they want more money.

I feel that at the very least, the customer in that case should be entitled to a complete refund of the product, regardless of whether they bought it 5 days or 5 years ago and regardless of the condition their device is in.

This should at least give some incentive to companies to not perform such sweeping changes to their terms of service and if they do, the customer can more easily remove themselves from the lock-in without taking a financial hit.

Yep! With zigbee2mqtt you even get bulb firmware updates too 😎

I've got a Hubitat and it works amazing. Local maker REST API and Google integration. Best of both worlds and no subscription.

Connect your lamps to the cloud now. Because we value your privacy. Your lamps will not work without the cloud. But because we value your privacy, we collect neccessary diagnostic data such as

1. Lamp on and off times
2. Lamp color
3. When the sexy-times preset is used
4. How often you use your bathroom light

We will use this data to sell you Philips Avent baby bottles 9 months after sexy time, when the bathroom light started to be used in shorter intervals but more often as if by a pregnant woman who needed to pee more often but shorter, Philips oral shower when your bathroom light wasn't on long enough to floss in the morning at least 3 times last week and a Philips vacuum cleaner if the lights never got bright enough so you'd see the dust buildup, thus you probably didn't vacuum, disgusting little customer-person. All of that because we value your privacy.

Nanoleaf bulbs are great and their Essentials line work offline without an account.

I have a nice mix of Hue and IKEA bulbs in my house, running on zigbee2mqtt. The IKEA bulbs are solid and I've had no major issues, but I did notice their smaller E14 bulbs had an annoying faint buzz sound when they were off, so they got swapped out for hue bulbs.

But as long as you're running zigbee2mqtt or some other hub I would still consider hue bulbs as an option.

@JackbyDev @hillbicks Philips Hue works with the zingbee protocol. You can integrate every single IOT in #homeassistant or you integrate the hub. I use the internal #zigbee protocol with the #conbee usb stick and it work flawlessly. With zingbee you can use also other IOTs from different manufacturers like IKEA or osram or some Asian brands. Just have a look at the Homeassistant homepage for all existing integrations.

I'm blocking my bridge's access to the internet right now, just in case they push an update for this. I never use the Hue app anyway.

Hmm, maybe. Depends on the infrastructure they put up. If there is a separate domain for the telemetry, then you can block it. Still no guarantee that it still works though.

The app will need internet access to login though. That really is a cat and mouse game that is not worth your time I'd say.

And as they'll use mobile app, potentially a metric shit ton of more. Location, contacts, usage patterns, make/model of phone, other connected devices on your wifi and the list goes on and on. I'm not sure if they actually get everything they can like tiktok, but atleat theoretical possibility exists.

My Hue lights continue to work when homeassistant is off, isn't that a normal ZigBee feature? The switches are still connected to the lights.

I just got a Filohome (tuya) dual switch and used tuya-cloud cutter put ESPHome on it. When setup with ESPhome it will still work even if HA is unreachable ok WiFi is down. I never even downloaded their app, made an account, or signed in.

Note for anyone trying to do the same, the Filohome triple switch device in tuya-cloudcutter will work to load the initial boot firmware but you need to change the yaml config when you install ESPHome. If anyone wants the yaml file let me know.