[tgirod]

a few days ago I helped my neighbour install some light fixtures in her house. She was sold some smart lightbulbs with it because you can dim them and change the light color a bit from a remote control. There are 6 or 8 lightbulbs next to each others.

I'm impressed how unreliable this tech is. Standing 2 meters away from the lightbulbs, I had to press 3 or 4 times the off button to turn them all off. I just don't understand why you would knowingly install that kind of crap.

[jmiserez]

Depends on the bulbs. Our Philips Hue bulbs (ZigBee) work perfectly fine. None of the issues you or the OP describes are an issue: they continue to work as regular bulbs if the hub fails, can be paired via Bluetooth app without proximity to the hub, and seem to have a lot of range. Best thing is that no wiring/electrician is necessary.

[t0mas88]

Same experience here, Philips (and other Zigbee lights like IKEA) did a great job.

Only problem I had with the Philips hub is that it's memory limited and can't handle more than about 50 devices. Above that you need to replace the hub with something like Home Assistant, but can keep the rest of the system.

[stordoff]

You can also use multiple hubs (HomeKit and various third party apps support this - the Hue app does, but IIRC you have to manually switch between them).

[t0mas88]

Yes I considered that, but it made some use cases that had buttons control lights that were on different hubs impossible.