You 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.
Evan Killham is a freelance writer who lives in Nebraska and isn’t interested in football, so he has plenty of time to play and think about video games. He has written for Bitmob and GamesBeat and sometimes, he even goes outside. But not too often because he’s heard there are bees out there. Occasionally, companies send free units for review. Evan subscribes to Cult of Mac’s Reviews Policy and also does not keep the items he receives for possible coverage.
12 responses to “How to get past Philips Hue’s ‘iCloud Sync’ roadblock”
That’s really dumb… I hope they update that app before my new puck arrives.
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NO! DON’T LOG OUT COMPLETELY! Just turn off ‘keychain’ and turn it back on again. Fixed it for me after waiting an hour for it to timeout. I had the same fear as you with logging completely out and this worked. For a company that likes to control everything Apple really did fail us with Homekit. Why on earth isn’t there a HomeKit app supplied by Apple. It’s absurd that each manufacturer has to write their own code to add devices to rooms etc. Incidentally this also fixed my broken ecobee thermostat – so it’s definitely not Philips problem. Apple strike two.
Where did you buy yours from? I cant find it online
best buy (Los Angeles) actually the day BEFORE it was officially released. I reserved it online and went there in the evening to get it and they were already wiped out of just about all accessories – except for some lightstrip extrensions, wall switches and white bulbs
For people trying to google this problem (and I realize these comments may not even be indexed) : “iCloud data sync is in progress. Please wait a few minutes and try again” is the message I got. Turning off keychain and back on reset it. By that point I’d (probably unnecessarily) deleted all my lights so had to add them again. Then of course you need to use another app like ‘Home’ or ‘Insteon+’ to create rooms so you can say ‘Turn my bedroom lights off’ or ‘Turn my upstairs lights on’
Where did you buy yours from? I cant find it online anywhere.
I don’t think I’ll be using the new Hue bridge until that problem is fixed. How stupid to have to sign out of iCloud just to get the device to work.
interesting for me it worked fine and then just suddenly crapped out when I added a lightstrip. which is actually worse than it not working in the beginning. I fear it may suddenly do the same. HOWEVER it is almost certainly NOT a Philips problem because essentially the same thing happened with my ecobee thermostat which wouldn’t respond to Siri all of a sudden. This fortunately fixed both but I’m waiting for it to break again :-/
Is this article a joke?
I cant tell anymore when its Apple-related.
Maybe you people just didn’t bend over at the correct angle?
Yeah that link is dead…and none are “in stock” anywhere on amazon other than the starter kit which ships in 10 days.
Anyone able to get Amazon Echo to connect to this new Hue bridge? Echo can’t seem to find the lights. I’m disappointed, as Echo worked well with the last bridge.