[akvadrako]

There was a firmware change in 2016 that blocked 3rd party bulbs but it didn't take long for the public pressure to influence them enough to revert it.

Philips Hue hubs do work with 3rd party ZLL endpoints. However, the likely reason they disabled 3rd party device support was because all Zigbee products have compatibility issues; nothing works as well as staying with one brand.

You can't always control all features and can't update firmware of all 3rd party devices from any hub. Sometimes you just need to manually configure the drivers (in code).