What makes for great smart lighting?

With so many options and brands out there, knowing what to look for in your smart lighting solution is key. Whether you’re a brand, manufacturer, retailer, or consumer, here are some ideas about what to consider in a smart lighting solution and what really matters for smart lighting today.

What are your smart lighting needs?

The first thing you want to think about are you needs for smart lighting, both right now and in the future. Are you a homeowner looking to make your current “dumb” lighting smart? Are you a brand seeking to enter the smart lighting market? With the smart lighting market expected to be worth $30.6 billion by 2025, now is as good a time as any to get in. According to the Swedish research firm Berg, 63 million American homes will quality as “smart” by 2022. If you are a homeowner you probably want to start small and see how you like it. Go with a single bulb and try it out for a month or two, then expand into multiple lighting fixtures and rooms. If you’re a brand, manufacturer, or retailer, start with the product categories you already know and that you already have had success in.

Smart lighting apps abound—know your apps

Ultimately it’s not really the bulb or fixture that makes the smart lighting, it’s the app that controls it (plus the module or chip inside) and what you look for in a smart lighting app will depend entirely on what your smart lighting needs are. The best smart lighting apps integrate with all the major smart home and IoT platforms, such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Samsung’s SmartThings. The best smart lighting apps are also highly adaptable to any environment and situation by allowing cross-brand and cross-product type communication, thus providing an avenue for you to easily broaden your smart home capabilities without needing to buy more hardware or recode.

Tuya Smart Lighting

Of course, check out the app reviews online, especially the reviews for how that app works with your current smart home virtual assistant technology of choice, be it SmartThings, Alexa, or Google Assistant. Also—go over to YouTube and see what people are saying about the app there, not just in the review videos but in the comments on the videos; this will give you the pulse on the app and overall sentiment around it among its users.

Features, features, and more features

Smart lighting apps come in all shapes and sizes, but it’s the features that differentiate one app from the next. Your smart lighting app should not only be cross-category capable and easily integrated with all the major virtual assistant technologies, it should also have all the bells and whistles, including voice control and smart scene linkage. It should also be easy to install, easy to control, and bug free.

The power of connectivity

Outside of the smart lighting app itself and the hardware inside the lighting, the next most important thing to have for your smart lighting is powerful connectivity. Your app and IoT ecosystem should be able to connect via Wi-Fi, Zigbee, or Bluetooth; each connectivity option has its own strengths and advantages, depending on your smart lighting needs. But your smart lighting provider needs to be able to give you all three options. An added plus would be connection to a powerful cloud, such as Tuya Cloud, which has proven its ability to handle extremely heavy data traffic without slowing down or going down.

In the end, the makings of a great smart lighting app come down to options: does your lighting and its accompanying app give you all the options and flexibility you need to do what you want to do with smart lighting? If the answer is yes, then you’ve found your smart lighting solution.