Rather than behaving as though nothing is wrong (until you go into the settings and find your Bridge is no longer present), it would make more sense to update the app to let users know that there is a problem communicating with the Bridge. In theory it’s of course possible for the Internet to have issues that prevent communication with the Bridge, or for your home network to have problems. However if you go into settings the Bridge has disappeared, and the entry says “Find new bridge”. Then I touched “All Off” in the app, and again the app shows no error the app is behaving as if the Hue Bridge is up and alive. The app did not complain about not being able to connect to the Bridge. First, I powered off the Hue Bridge (to move it to the basement), and while it was powered off I launched the app. In the process of testing the range I made some other interesting observations on the behavior of the Hue lighting system.
Conceivably, there could also be problems if your immediate neighbor also picked up a Hue-how would the lights know to talk to your Hue network and not his? This is both the blessing and curse of going with an easy to configure technology. you just buy additional bulbs and they apparently broadcast and communicate with any and all Hue devices), we would assume that 50 lights and a single Bridge is about as far as you'll be able to go within a single area. Given the use of the ZigBee controller along with the fact that there is no configuration on a per device level to connect it to the network (e.g. What isn't clear is whether or not you can increase the total number of devices by adding additional Bridges to the location.
(Yeah, sorry-I didn't have a spare $3000 lying around waiting to be invested in Hue lights!) Philips states that the Hue Bridge can support up to 50 bulbs, which should be sufficient for a moderate size house. The second question-the number of total devices supported-is something that we couldn't actually test, as we only had the three bulbs in the Starter Pack and with a cost of around $60 per additional bulb I wasn't about to try to overload the network. If you had a gigantic estate with lights spaced out hundreds of feet between them, you might run into problems, but that's a corner case at best typical homes should be fine. Even at that range and with all the material potentially interfering with communication, the Bridge was still able to see the bulb, so if that sort of range propagation holds for communication between the lights, coverage should be fine in most layouts. The total distance between the Bridge and the light is approximately feet, and there are two floors and four or five walls between the Bridge and the bulb. Then I moved the remaining light to the farthest corner of my house, a second story bedroom. To test the range of the Bridge on its own, I placed the Bridge in a corner of my basement and powered off the two other lights (they were unscrewed so physically they’re no longer present on the network). Testing either of these can be a bit tricky, but I did make an effort to find the range limit of the Bridge. First is the total number of devices that can be supported, and second is the range of coverage that's provided. Besides the setup process and features, there are a couple of questions that may be important.