SANTALA Smart LED Strip Lights, Compatible with Apple HomeKit, Alexa, Siri Remote Control on 2.4 Ghz Wi-Fi, Dimmable Waterproof 16000K Colors 2m/6.6ft

Look, this light strip sometimes costs around $30 or even less depending on where/when you get. This is a perfect HomeKit light strip at a faction of the cost of the Hue. Plus there is no hub and it’s usb powered which worked for me in my particular set up. Others mention the adhesion being not good, but it’s fine. Either use different adhesion methods, or use a light strip channel which makes the entire install look 100x better which is what I did. For those that mention HomeKit connectivity issues, I too initially ran into scenarios where it would be paired, but then went into “updating mode” after a while where it never reconnected. The only solution was to unplug and replug them back into the USB port. However I was determined that this wasn’t the fault of the product but most likely with my WiFi router. And bingo! A couple edits to my WiFi set up (I enabled IGMP Snooping) and these lights have not disconnected since.

Decent light strips that work well with HomeKit. Their app needs a lot of work, however. Took a minute to figure out how to get the strips to be in “the cloud” for connecting to Google so read the directions carefully. It’s all there. Use in our kitchen for above counter lighting. Seems to work flawlessly with HomeKit. Also, works well with Google Home once I figured out how to get Google to recognize it. Connected the first time to HomeKit very easily. If the app was better I’d give it 5 stars.Edit: One strip I bought stopped connecting and I couldn’t get it to reconnect no matter what I tried. Flickered some too. It was super easy the first time to connect like within seconds so I can only assume this one went bad. Sending it back for a replacement. Shouldn’t do this after only a month. Hope the others continue to work. Also, the app is not doing the updates at all. They need to fix the update part of the app.

In order to connect them it took a bit, but they work amazing, the adhesive can be a little better, but the lights are nice and works great with google home and homekit.

Well, the first tip-off that things weren’t going great was that the product was clearly a return that they shipped back out as “new.” With that said, it was at least functional.Does it change color? Well, yes… more or less. It arguably can produce about 16 colors of varying intensities. And when I say varying intensities, I mean the range from a really dim bulb (like an engineer at Santala) to almost invisible (like the quality assurance at Santala).One of the ratings is for “Adhesion.” How do you rate adhesive that was previously used, removed, packed into a container, set in a warehouse, and then resold to some naive dude who assumed a $25 light strip might actually work? I gave it one star, and I was being generous. The only way to make it stick was to use picture mounting tape strips from 3M.The best aspect of these lights? When I turn everything else off in the room, the brightest setting is nice and dim for use as a backlight for the TV on movie nights. No worries about bright backlighting distracting you from what’s on the screen.

Bought this on a whim, as it was the only light strip I found that both supported Homekit AND was USB-powered — two things I was looking for to match my setup. Now, I certainly didn’t expect it to have the reliability of the rest of my Hue lights but it’s been anything but. It added easily via Homekit and was fine for days, in fact, I really held it in high esteem and wanted to come back and review it positively. But then, out of nowhere, it begin showing up as unreachable in Homekit, rarely resolving itself without a manual kill of the power. I have not been able to figure out why they would suddenly start to be unreliable day in and day out but here we are. I even tried their very bare bones app, hoping I would need a firmware update but I was up to date. It’s a shame because it seems quality and, again, I very much loved the ability to charge via USB-A and not take up another power plug. It seems trivial but I found no other brand on Amazon with such a design. Unfortunately, its unreliability has caused too many issues for it to be part of your starting lineup.

I already own a strip of LED lights that we have mounted behind our television for mood lighting as well as to ease the strain on our eyes and it works great! The only thing? We're lazy and well connected and wish that the LED strip was controllable through our Apple Home App. That being said I was very excited when I came across this product; a smart LED strip that works with Apple Home! We bought it and were super excited to put it on the TV. We had to take down the old LED strip to put this up but no worries.This item was not 100% easy to set up as we had to download a separate app from the manufacturer to set it up. Although annoying, what was more annoying was that the majority of the settings for the lights were in the 3rd party app and not in the Home Kit app. In the Apple Home Kit App you can set about 8 different colors to choose from but you can really only have full custom colors in the 3rd party app. This wasn't a deal breaker for me per se because I really don't need one billion colors or really any colors at all as this is just mounted behind/on our TV to emit soft light from behind to ease eye strain. Soft light…here comes the deal breaker.The LED nodes are not as numerous as one would like. I don't know if the lumens are less than the old (dumb) strip but the total brightness output is very much less than the old strip because there's just not as many LED nodes as the old one. I had quite a difficult time dialing in the right color to replicate a soft white light. Even when dialed in to my liking it was just not bright enough! At all! The old strip could get very bright, like bright enough that it was its own light in the room! But this product was just way too dim. It couldn't get bright enough to even ease the eye strain while watching television at night, it was just too dark in the room.If you don't really need a bright light from a smart LED strip that works with the Apple Home Kit then this will be a great buy. If you need something bright (and again I didn't NEED a bright light but this couldn't even ease the eye strain of watching TV in a dark room) then this isn't for you.