Philips Hue is finally addressing a long-running and frustrating limitation that has particularly impacted smart home power users. In a support document on its website, Philips Hue says that users will soon be able to add multiple Bridges to one account – here’s why that’s a big deal.
Each Philips Hue Bridge supports up to 50 devices. While 50 devices sounds like a lot, it’s a limit that an increasingly large number of users have been brushing up against as the Hue ecosystem has expanded. Making matter worse, Philips Hue has also only allowed people to have one Bridge tied to their account.
If you hit that 50-device limit and added a second Bridge to your setup, you’d have to link that Bridge to a new account. Those two Bridges would effectively be siloed from each other, complicating your smart home setup.
As spotted by Hueblog.com, however, Philips Hue is finally addressing this problem. In an updated on its website, Philips Hue says that support for controlling multiple Bridges with one account is coming later this year.
“Later this year, you’ll be able to add multiple Bridges to one account and sort them into Homes to keep your system organized,” Philips Hue explains.
Top comment by A
Home Assistant solves all of these problems: you can control as many devices as you need, you can add everything to Apple home still if you so desire, and it's like 1000x more flexible than either one. No need to silo devices between ecosystems or care a lot about how they actually connect to your smart home (but ideally: WiFi for data-heavy things, zigbee for everything else until thread and matter actually work).
As Hueblog points out, there are still a lot of unknown questions about how exactly Philips Hue will implement this feature. Still, it’s a step in the right direction and solves an increasingly-common smart home problem.
9to5Mac’s Take
One thing worth noting: if you control all of your Philips Hue accessories through Apple Home, you can link multiple Hue Bridges to HomeKit to skirt the 50-device limit.
This isn’t necessarily an ideal solution, particularly if you’re like me and also have various third-party accessories that are exclusively controllable via the Hue app.
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