iLightShow for Philips Hue 4+

Great functionality

This app lets me sync my Philips Hue Go lamps to music. I absolutely love this functionality. The effect looks amazing. I do tend to set the effects to ‘chill’, as I find ‘auto’ and ‘party’ change to quickly to my taste.

When I used the app to play jungle sounds (yoga type music) I was absolutely amazed by the effect.

One bug that I hope to see changed in a future update: I normally play my music on two connected HomePods. When I use Airplay from the music app, the paired HomePods are visible as an option. However, from this app I can only select one of the HomePods; the second one cannot be seen. I found a workaround (that is a bit of a hazzle) though: if I set the Airplay from the app to my AppleTV, I can then change the Airplay in the Apple Music app to switch to my paired HomePod.

Really great app that does what it says, but...

So I’ve been playing with this app for a few of days and my kids love it! We’ve had a dance party practically every night. It does exactly what it says and works pretty well with Apple Music.

The biggest con is that to unlock more than one light you have to $4.99 in app purchase. You can’t really evaluate that app without paying for it. I didn’t mind spending the $5, EXCEPT, if my kids want it on all their devices I’ll have to pay on each one. Truth is I’ll hardly use this app, but my kids might, but I’m not sure it’s worth $20 to me. Maybe $10.

The next problem is a lack of music controls within the app. If you want to pause, play or scrub your music you need to jump back to Apple Music. I think Apple made these controls available for developers to use. So adding these would be a convenient touch.

Finally, this would make an outstanding APPLE TV app. The controls might need to be simplified, or possible use an iCloud shared preferences file (so the advanced settings are done on the phone/iPad), but this would be the best solution for me. The kids regularly play their dance part music on the TV.

Developer Response ,

Hey, thanks for your detailed feedbacks and suggestions. I’m currently working on a « cloud » solution for the next few months that may fix your issue for all your devices. I’ll also work on an Apple TV version in the next few months :-)
Feel free to reach out to me if you need more help/details or even give more feedbacks, I’d be pleased to help :-)
Cheers,
Nicolas

Great, but needs a couple improvements

This really is a great app and I really enjoy how it interacts with my hue lights. There are only a couple issues (that I don’t believe have been addressed) that hold it back from a 5 star:

1) Buying premium isn’t that bad, not that expensive... but I can’t share across devices. I bought this on my phone and would like to share it with my wife and son. But I also don’t want to pay another $5 each to do so. If there was a way to share the premium feature then that would be fantastic.

2) This is the biggest drawback to me... the app doesn’t run in the background. If I leave the app or close my phone, everything stops working. It’s not realistic to think that I’ll leave my phone on for hours while listening to music or hosting a party. If this can be addressed then that would make this app a 5 star for me.