Cync is back at CES 2022 with a plethora of new smart lights and products, but I’m not going to talk about them. Instead, let’s discuss how terrible the existing Cync lights are.
As a gadget reviewer, I get to test out many products, which usually means I do a lot of research when it comes to buying my own gear. However, when I needed four new smart lightbulbs a few months ago, I decided that since every bulb I’ve ever tested has been more or less fine, I’d just grab a few Cync bulbs.
This was a big mistake.
I picked up two types of Cync bulbs, including a normal incandescent and an RGB. I tried five or six times over multiple months to set up the lights with the Cync app, only for it to fail time and time again.
After this, I resorted to using the smart lights like regular bulbs with a switch. Then, finally, after several months, I found an unopened Cync light when cleaning my basement and noticed that it said it could be “seamlessly” set up with Google on the box.
Armed with this new info, I found that if I moved the bulbs to the same room as my Nest Audio smart speaker I was able to set them up directly through the Google Home app. This is good for me since it means that I didn’t waste $60 on lightbulbs and that I never had to open the Cync app again. However, I’d still call this a terrible user experience since it’s something I’d never expect my friends to figure out how to set up. Further, as much as it works for me, the Home app only offers roughly 50 percent of the light’s intended functionality.
Looking online, you can see that there are dozens of bad reviews for the Cync app and every Google Search about the smart lights seems to turn up stories of people having issues.
The company still sells these bulbs and if this new report from The Verge is any indication, it appears that it’s doubling down on its app this year. The report even mentions that Cync will start using the new Smart Home standard Matter to bring more products from other companies into its app
A new version of the app releases in March — just in time for my birthday — so perhaps this rebuild will solve the poor first attempt.
However, it seems like Cync is either blissfully unaware of its faulty products or simply doesn’t care.
MobileSyrup has reached out to Cync for more information about its new products and to see if the company is aware of the issues with its existing lights. I also plan to go hands-on with the new lights once they release this March.