Philips Hue won't work with third-party light bulbs for now
Until a certification program kicks in, it's Philips' own lighting or nothing.
Bad news if you're planning to slip a few non-Philips light bulbs into your Hue setup: they won't work, at least not for a while. Philips has dropped support for third-party bulbs after noticing that a growing number of them had "interoperability issues" preventing them from playing nicely with official Hue gear. Support will come back, but only through a Friends of Hue program that will certify lighting. Any existing lights you're using will work, Philips is quick to note -- it's only new, untested additions that are getting the boot.
Philips maintains that it's still committed to open technology, and its Hue bridge will continue to work with ZigBee-compatible hardware. Even so, this isn't going to please the home automation crowd. If you want any Philips gear in a new setup, you'll have to go all-Hue in the short term... and when third-party support is ready, you may miss out on bulbs that are cheaper or more flexible. Only a "minimal fraction" of users are likely to be affected by this, Philips says, but it's still unfortunate.
[Image credit: Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg via Getty Images]
