Thunderstorm for LIFX

I will buy your light apps again and again and again. Thunderstorms is CHOICE. the firestorm app still needs a certain Juno se quoi BUT. Just lovely all around. Bravo Sir. Ps. Thank you for allowing me to darken the sky and keep the flashes bright. 🤍🤍🤍

Having used LIFX for the past three years, I’ve seen a lot of issues come and go. From lights not syncing to firmware problems, etc. I know it’s far from perfect but the developers of LIFX have strived to make it better. With that said, this app is phenomenal. It does exactly what it says it does and it does it WELL. I understand some folks may have had issues with it, but before you blame this app I’d take a look and see if your LIFX bulbs are really working the way they should. With my current setup (30+ bulbs) this app makes the whole house feel like a thunderstorm. Paired with a solid audio system and it’s the next best thing to having a real storm. Kudos to the developer for such a nice piece of software. Give it a try!

In general, the app produces a pretty cool effect. There's some issues with it, though. The biggest is using the cloud API instead of the LAN API. The LIFX app uses the latter if the device is on the same network as the bulbs, which is why it responds so fast. For those of us with a lot of LIFX bulbs, this thunderstorm app causes a lot of "too many requests" errors, which could be remedied by just keeping it all local. Second, it's not terribly clear how to use groups, and even once I got that figured out, setting up colors caused some unusual responses in bulbs in the rest of the house anyway - such as the app thinking my white bulbs were set to a color. While it limited the changing effects to the specified groups, it still changed colors of all lights in my house (where possible). I confirmed that I had selected the same group in all sections of the settings. Third, the thunder sound seems a bit canned. It lacks a lot of the sonic depth a real thunder roll or lightning strike would produce. It would really put the overall storm effect to great lengths if higher end sound clips were used that had a lot of deep bass (especially for those with a sonic shaker). At present, there's very little bass. I can see that the creator went to good lengths elsewhere striving for a realistic soundscape, like placing the thunder at varying distances, or delaying the sound relative to the lightning like you'd experience in a real storm. Overall, I think the app is a great start, but could use a bit of polishing.