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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.

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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.

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?"

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