The Philips Hue app for Android and iOS just received its biggest update in over two years, adding a pleasant-looking new user experience and improved smarts.

“The Philips Hue app delivers a new look-and-feel and convenient shortcuts, so you can adjust your Philips Hue smart lighting in a few simple taps,” Signify, the makers of Philips Hue, notes. “Use the new color pickers feature or 30 new scenes to transform your lighting into an extraordinary experience.”

If you’re familiar with the app already, this update represents a major change. It looks different, prettier, but it also works better.

As before, the opening Home screen is arranged by room, and you can toggle all of the lights in a room together and adjust their brightness.

When you select a room, you’re presented with each of the lights it contains, and they can now be configured individually. That works as before, too, it’s just nicer looking.

But now you can more easily select from a longer list of available scenes—essentially multi-light color schemes; Signify says there are now over 30—or pick the exact color you want by light (or in groups) using a color picker.

Aside from the look and feel, the biggest change here is that the app remembers your past selections so that you can more easily call up scenes or colors you’ve used previously. That’s an obvious addition in retrospect, and is very useful.

Philips Hue is available for free from the Google Play Store or, for iOS devices, from Apple’s App Store.

Tagged with Philips Hue, smart lighting