Today’s story is about Philips Hue by Signify. They will soon start forcing accounts on all users and upload user data to their cloud. For now, Signify says you’ll still be able to control your Hue lights locally as you’re currently used to, but we don’t know if this may change in the future. The privacy policy allows them to store the data and share it with partners.
What have been your complications with the app? In my experience (no account or bridge) the only issue is that it takes a literally second or two for the app to be able to control the lights.
It works but they pressure you hard nowadays to create an account when you use the app the first time. An account that you don’t need if you have no Hue bridge. They once had a Bluetooth only app without all of these privacy invasion shenanigans.