Philips says lights out for the original Hue Bridge as of April 30

If you’re still running the original Hue Bridge (the non-HomeKit-compatible round model), functionality will be limited after April 30. If your bridge is square, then you have the v2 and are unaffected – at least, for now …

The company tweeted the news.

After April 2020 no software updates will be made available for the Hue Bridge v1 and compatibility with our online services will be terminated at that time. The Hue Bridge v1 can still be controlled locally via the dedicated Philips Hue Bridge v1 app.

This means you’ll still have full control from inside the home, but remote functionality will cease. Of potentially greater concern, no security updates will be issued either.

Philips told CNET the reason for this is that the four-year-old hardware is no longer powerful enough to keep up with developments.

The Philips Hue team keeps working hard to enable new capabilities. The Hue bridge v1 no longer has the resources to guarantee the evolution of the system — from compatibility and quality, to speed and security — thus we decided to end the support for it.

The company seems to have managed to annoy owners of v1 and v2 bridges alike. Owners of the original one want to know why functionality they currently enjoy is being taken away.

https://twitter.com/SwelterTheChef/status/1235907377297309696

While v2 owners want to know when they will be next.

I have a v2, and read this with some concern. what is the scheduled end of life for the v2?
why do you terminate online services. to save you money or for a valid reason?

— Mark Liversedge (@liversedge) March 6, 2020

Philips is doing its best to reassure people that the v2 will be around for a long time yet.

There is currently no scheduled end of life for the V2 bridge, and we’re not working on a new bridge at the moment either so will continue working with the V2 […]

We have designed the Bridge V2 to be future proof. We actually decided to eventually discontinue further software updates and online services for the Hue Bridge v1, in order to focus on supporting our Hue Bridge v2 ecosystem.

Personally, I can’t wait for the end of bridges. I have so many of the darned things I had to buy a dumb switch to provide sufficient ports and build a rack to organize them.