I wouldn't use the Hue app at all, but since HomeKit seems to thing that a tungsten color is either pure yellow or a really ugly almost blueish white, I get stuck having to use the Hue app to get towards the "read" color they have.
I got all the standard Hue color schemes ported over to/as HomeKit scenes at some point, though at the moment I can't remember exactly how (there is a "Sync with Siri" option of some sort in the setup menu, but I don't recall if that'a how I did it). "Set reading" and "Set relax" are two of my most used Siri commands at home, and do exactly what the Hue choices do. I find commanding HomeKit to arbitrary colors rather less useful (though "dim my living room lights by 30%" is quite handy).
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"Complaining about bridges is ridiculous" - same people lighting fires over "Dongle-gate"
How many light bulbs do you normally carry around with you?
I don't like dongles hanging off the phone or laptop I'm actively using. I don't care about Home automation hubs that sit unobtrusively in a corner, untouched, doing their job.
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The bridge keeps all those devices off of your WIFI network. I don't need that many devices eating up IP addresses and resources on my network.
Put your home network in the 10.0.0.0/8 private network space, and you'll have 16 million IPv4 addresses to play with. I doubt anyone owns enough devices to overflow that. And 99.9% of the time, the bulbs will be passively listening for commands, using no network resources. I don't mind the Hue bridge at all, but those aren't very strong reasons to avoid individually addressable bulbs or other IoT devices. If they're using mDNS and DNS-SD (essentially Apple's Bonjour) to tell each other of their existence, that'll provide a little traffic, but still down in the noise.
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Hue uses Zigbee which is a mesh network. That is not a hub that comes with it it is a bridge that connects wifi networks to Zigbee networks. Hub and Bridges are vastly different networking devices.
The Hue Bridge is a connection point from one network into another, but much more than a "bridge" in standard networking terminology - it isn't simply relaying/translating packets from one network to another, there's a lot more going on. The Hue Bridge accepts high level commands (roughly, things like "set scene x") via a RESTful HTTP interface on the IP side, does internal processing/lookup, and then issues a whole slew of lower level commands to individual lights out on the Zigbee side.