How to get past Philips Hue’s ‘iCloud Sync’ roadblock

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Philips hue lighting
Sure, the lights are all pretty now. But at what cost, Philips?
Photo: Philips

Pro Tip Cult of Mac bugYou should be excited to get Siri up and running with your new Philips Hue bridge and control your lights with the power of your voice, but one annoying error might stop you. It definitely had me scouring the Internet for answers when I was setting up my smartbulb system this afternoon, and I’d love to save you that time.

Because if you’ve spent $200 on fancy lightbulbs, you probably want to start using them right away, damn it.

The new Philips Hue bridge that launched Monday has full support for HomeKit, Apple’s home-automation framework. But here’s the issue: You’ll go to set up “Siri Voice Control” under Settings in the official Hue app for iOS, and it’ll prompt you to tap a setup button. You’ll then get a screen giving you a rundown of all of the exciting things you’re about to be able to do, like call for lighting scenes and adjust individual bulbs’ brightness just by saying, “Dim the lamp to 43 percent.” You’ll get super pumped.

And then you’ll probably get an error message saying, “iCloud Data sync in progress” and telling you to try again in a few minutes. If you do, you’ll get the same result. It’s easy to fix this issue, but the treatment may be worse than the disease.

To get around the “iCloud data sync” issue, you have to sign out of your iCloud account on your iPhone or iPad by going to Settings > iCloud and tapping “Sign out” at the bottom of the menu.

You’re probably thinking, “Hey, won’t that possibly delete my iCloud info, including the credit cards I have set up for Apple Pay?” And you’re right because that’s what happened to me. It sounds excessive, sure, but this is actually Philips’ official recommendation.

You’ll have to do a little recovery work after you take this measure (which is essentially a nuclear option), and maybe you’ll have to call your bank to get those cards back on, but the good news is that your Philips Hue bridge will absolutely listen to your voice.

I just dimmed my bedroom lamp to 47 percent just because I could. Worth it.

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