Review on 🔌 Assistant-Compatible Philips Hue Equivalent by Richard Sallah

I bought this kit because it costs the same as a Philips hub. I had to do this because Philips had stopped supporting my hub and wanted to disable its features even though it had those features. already works fine. Unfortunately, I ended up in this ecosystem by buying a large number of Philips Hue bulbs, a mistake I would like to correct. This is the second time that Philips has seriously scammed its users. The first time was when they launched the Friends of Hue program and announced that ALL third-party bulbs would be discontinued and might eventually stop working. Their user base hit them so hard that they had to retire, but it still showed their strength. Now they are intentionally breaking Gen1 hubs to force users to "upgrade" to a new hub with seemingly identical features. They "apologized" for this by offering a discount code that only worked on their own website compared to the manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) - it wasn't a discount at all compared to buying from an online retailer. You are a very mean company. If you haven't shopped in the ecosystem before, AVOID. It was a big mistake for me to buy a large number of their bulbs and now unfortunately I have them so now I have to buy a new socket. Also, both of the bulbs that come with this kit could NOT be detected. I had to add them by serial number. Transferring to a new hub took forever and 6 different attempts - things kept going wrong with software updates. I had to factory reset the new hub twice before it finally worked. It took me more than half a day of repeated attempts to connect the bulbs. If my parents got it they would surely give up and send it back disappointed.