This is an excellent question and you must also be reading our beta chat bc Philips is a hot topic right now.
Short Answer
No, unfortunately these will not work like the Friends of Hue functionality (officially). We aren’t able to get Friends of Hue certified bc they are not taking any applications right now unless we want to add EnOcean to our switches (wut…?).
Long Answer
I was about to share the email, but noticed it said, “Classified” at the top, so I’ll just explain it.
We initially wrote in to see if we could be, “Friends of Hue” certified and had an intro call with their FOH team lead. Within 2 minutes, we were shut down lol. I’m exaggerating, but the gist of it was that they were super overwhelmed and short staffed that they couldn’t dedicate any time to new partners right now.
I even made this awesome PPT:
Inovelli + Hue - Overview_compressed.pdf (571.6 KB)
This was back in October/November timeframe and they said we can follow up after the new year, but it still would likely be a not right now type thing. They also mentioned something about EnOcean, which I hadn’t heard of outside of some reports that I read back in 2018.
We then reached out in early January to see if we could at least be added to their platform as an unofficial partner (it was a long shot, but I noticed other brands on the list that weren’t listed on their site, so I thought I’d try). This was also shot down. However, they were at least more clear this time that they needed us to support the EnOcean protocol in order to be a FOH partner.
At this time, we don’t plan on supporting EnOcean as we simply don’t have the resources. Looks like a cool protocol, but hard to pull off right now.
So, that leaves us with more of an, “unofficial” integration until we figure out what to do (maybe we’ll just have some variants or something of the firmware that are Hue specific that supports EnOcean).
At this time, we’re trying to get the switch to pair with the Hue bridge, but are having some issues in that the bridge detects the switch, but then fails during the key exchange. We’re thinking Hue put some sort of proprietary lock on their hub to only work with approved vendors.
This is, unfortunately, why I took any reference to Hue out of the hype video. It sucks bc I was really excited to pair up with Hue and we have gotten our switches to bind properly using Hubitat and Home Assistant (in other words, the switch pairs directly to the Hue bulb, but requires a third party hub to do it since Hue locked us out) so I know it works and is a limitation on Hue’s end.
We’re still trying for the unofficial integration, but my fear is that even if we do get it to work, Hue has a history of updating their gateway to break any unofficial integrations (Philips Hue cuts support for third-party bulbs - CNET).
I’m not sure how Lutron does it – likely the power of their name and a fat check to Hue via licensing and/or platform fees as I don’t believe they support EnOcean since their products run on a proprietary protocol.
These guys… I swear their product manager hangs out in our forum lol.
Note for legal purposes: I’m not privy to internal discussions at Lutron nor do I have any associations with them. I’m not claiming they have copied our design, but rather merely pointing out the similarities as brought up in the quote above. The above design is my opinion only based off public knowledge shown in sources and screenshots below.
Source for Dimmer: Lutron Press Releases - Up-to-Date Light Control News and Information
Source for RA3 Line: System Devices | RadioRA 3 by Lutron
Sorry to derail – the RA3 announcement really peeved me off. I get it imitation is the best form of flattery, but c’mon Lutron, this was lazy.