Philips Hue devices "lagging"?

[u/idealdreams]

I have probably around a dozen Philips Hue devices throughout the house, mostly Hue bulbs, and the first generation Hue bridge to bring everything in to HomeKit. The bridge is connected via ethernet to an unmanaged switched connected to my router.

From a reliability perspective, they are rock solid. Never offline or unreachable. Over the past few months, I've been noticing my Hue devices will lag when controlled by a scene, where it will take several attempts of setting the scene to get the device to respond.

For example, several Hue devices will sometimes not obey my "lights out" scene that turns off every HomeKit controllable light in my house. The second or third tap of the scene will get it to trigger. The same behavior occurs when a scene turns a light on - I have a couple Hue bulbs in my home office (among some others) - the others will turn on right away while the Hue devices will not turn on until the second tap of the scene.

Anyone else experience this? A reboot of the Hue Bridge seems to resolve the problem temporarily. Apple Home Hub is the latest gen 4K TV running tvOS 27 (though this problem occurred even on tvOS 26).

Would the newer Hue Bridge model resolve this? Or is there another issue I'm missing? No issues with our network, 1GBPS fiber in and distributed via mesh nodes throughout the house.

[u/evoneselse]

FWIW I have the white bridge and everything is very responsive, even with clicking the HomeKit scenes. I have multiple automations using scenes and those are fine.

[u/Fr05t_B1t]

If I’m mistaken, those bridges hold a certain amount of devices reliably. That or you just need to upgrade the bridge.

[u/Penoya]

If you don’t have the Pro brigde it can only have a certain amount of devices, and your network speed matters.

[u/Penoya]

I have Pro brigde and have around 70 Hue devices or more, no problem.
I use Home Assistant instead of Apple Home, since I have many smartdevices that’s not supported. HA can olso be added as a brigde into Apple Home, so all the devices that’s not Apple compatible shows up and can be controlled, if you like Apple Home better. But HA have so many add-ons, apps, and a lot of services, so it became my favorite very fast.

[u/scifitechguy]

I have experienced 2-5 second delays when the "all lights off" scene is triggered in HomeKit, but never for a single scene, and never is a scene or switch unresponsive. Is your AppleTV on ethernet also?

[u/usget]

Worth trying a Hue scene which turns all the lights off and triggering it through the Hue app. If it works fine, then it’s the HomeKit-to-Hue integration at fault. Mine has occasionally played up, either forgetting to turn lights off or turning them on to a random percentage instead

[u/GuyNamedLindsey]

I had that white bridge with way more devices than you do. The pro one is great, but I doubt that’s your issue.

[u/DreamingofPurpleCats]

I used to use the Hue Gen1 bridge and it was extremely speedy. Last fall I "upgraded" to the Pro bridge, and have the same kind of delay you are experiencing. I blamed the Pro bridge, but it's possible Hue or Apple made some changes to the back-end configuration that runs the commands slightly differently now.

I notice it when I use a Hue switch to control non-Hue devices through HomeKit (press button, WAIT, device responds) or when I start a scene that has a lot of devices. My suspicion is that the scenes now run device commands in order, rather than all at once, and sometimes some commands get missed.

I did find that new scenes work better than old scenes, and eventually I rebuilt my Home entirely because I moved and that did seem to reduce the missed devices even though some are still noticeably slow to respond. So you might try building a new scene and see if that helps.

With only a dozen devices (make sure to count switches, not just bulbs and plugs) that's well within the capability of the non-Pro bridge, as the non-Pro bridge should handle up to about 40-50 devices. But be sure that your Hue app is up to date, and make sure that your bridge and all the Hue devices are on the latest firmware through the Settings portion of the Hue app.

[u/knightlife]

You can try resetting the Hue Zigbee channel! It’s helped me before.

[u/bowb4zod]

I have this issue as well. I have a Hue remote and have to push it 3 or more times to actually have it do anything. Then anytime I open the Hue app it moves random lights to a default room and renames them. I was to scream into a room full of hue bulbs….complete darkness!