Thank you for all the infos. You just reminded me i'm a bit biased regarding Hue because I use the Third party app Iconnecthue (ios only) wich is STELLAR. Always been very ahead of Philips schedule regarding features, way more powerful, and the best balance between friendlyness and efficiency. One of the best piece of software i've been using this last decade. Thank you very much to the team. Indeed, running Hue with official software is more cumbersome and limited.
The recent move from Philips lead me to consider running everything through Home Assistant but I'm not ready yet. Configuring accessories and scene with Iconnecthue (especially splitting behaviors for week/week-end or during day) is too smooth and powerful). Also the Hue Bridge is rock solid, while my HA instance isn't. I could consider it if I were alone but i'm not. Maybe when I'll stop playing with HA and break things.
For the moment, using adaptive lightning on my Hue bridge controlled lights through HA is an incredible joy tho.
Absolutely understandable. I've actually been in the exact same situation when I was still using Philips Hue. I was using HuePro on Android, which is (or unfortunately rather, was) also an incredibly powerful and well polished application maintained by a third party. I got confused a few times when people brought up issues only to discover that the base Philips app was lagging behind a lot in functionality and user friendliness.
As it stands, I definitely understand your approach. Personally, I would also recommend any non-tech-savvy person or people who don't want to mess with it for a while to just use the Hue bridge with HA, if they were to try it out. The Hue bridge is really rock solid, no complaints there.
In case anyone else stumbles upon this and is curious, I'm now using a SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle and a Raspberry Pi and at least for me, the stability of the local Zigbee network is as good as it was with the Hue bridge before.
The recent move from Philips lead me to consider running everything through Home Assistant but I'm not ready yet. Configuring accessories and scene with Iconnecthue (especially splitting behaviors for week/week-end or during day) is too smooth and powerful). Also the Hue Bridge is rock solid, while my HA instance isn't. I could consider it if I were alone but i'm not. Maybe when I'll stop playing with HA and break things.
For the moment, using adaptive lightning on my Hue bridge controlled lights through HA is an incredible joy tho.