[brianaker]

Just stop for a moment and ask yourself "could the author of this post be wrong."

Philips just introduced Matter support which requires local access, and continues to support Apple Home as well. There are dozens of apps which can manage their hubs. ( FWIW I use iConnectHue. )

Philips also just introduced cameras, which did require them to update their EULA.

[wlesieutre]

I left an App Store review expressing my disappointment and got this explanation in a response from the “developer” (relevant sentence clipped for brevity):

> To keep your accounts and products secure and ensure you get the most out of your system, you’ll need to create a Philips Hue account soon.

To make sure my account is secure, I’ll be required to have an account. Cool.

[brianaker]

There are no announcements by Hue to developers that the CLIP API is going away, so I suspect there is a lot over speculation based on a clueless Twitter post made by some droid that most likely doesn't even understand the questions they were asked.

[wlesieutre]

Lacking any believable reason for suddenly deciding my lightbulbs need an online account connected to Hue's servers, I think it's fair to assume they're eventually going to do something shitty with their online system that I could have avoided otherwise. It's happened with so many IoT platforms.

They won't announce it today, and any bad press they get this week will be long forgotten, but someday they'll come back around with some bright executive saying "You know, we could extract more value out of these lightbulb users, they've invested hundreds of dollars in our ecosystem, what're they going to do throw them all out instead of paying us $5/month?"

[hnbad]

In all communication so far Philips/Signify has suggested that going forward

1) You will need to sign in with your Hue account even when using the app locally and

2) This will store (a copy of) all metadata in their cloud to enable you to use remote access.

Arguably this is moot if you're already using remote access but it means the Hue app and bridge will be unusuable for anyone who chose Hue because it does not store your data in the cloud. I also believe this is an attempt at consolidation to make it easier for them to support cloud-storage cameras as part of the same platform. It's still understandable why some users might object to this, especially if they have no interest in using any of the cloud features or new devices that will require it. Amazon Echo requires local access too but that doesn't mean you can opt out of Amazon storing your (meta)data in the cloud if you want to use your Echo to control Zigbee devices.