How Sengled Screwed Its Customers and Will Probably Get Away With It
Sengled just pulled off one of the slowest and most aggravating tech suicides I have seen in years. They did it without so much as a courtesy update to the people who made them relevant in the first place.
Their once reliable smart bulbs are now lifeless plastic paperweights. The Sengled app barely loads. Pairing is a joke. Alexa and Google have walked away. Every week another batch of bulbs just stops working.
Silence From the Top
Through all of it there has not been a single word from Sengled. No press release. No apology. Not even a quick “Hey, we are looking into it” post.
Sengled went full ostrich. Head buried in the sand while tens of thousands of homes went dark. It started small with a few outages here and there. Then came the “wrong password” errors during pairing. Alexa commands slowed to a crawl.
Then Google Home gave up. Now, even if you manage to open the app, it feels like stepping into a time machine. Your current room names are gone. Routines are missing. Your setup has reverted to years ago.
Amazon eventually stepped in like a pissed off landlord and ripped the Sengled Alexa skill from their store entirely. Their message was basically, “If you can’t keep the lights on, literally, we are done.”
The Personal Burn
What makes this worse for me is that I vouched for them. For years I told friends, clients, and family that Sengled was the way to go for affordable, reliable smart lighting. I probably convinced dozens of people to spend their money with them.
Now those same people have bulbs failing one by one with no support from the company. It is one thing for a product to stop being great. It is another for a company to have zero decency or accountability while it happens.
The Class Action Fantasy
This is where people start yelling “class action lawsuit” like it is the cavalry. And yes, one will almost certainly happen.
You will see headlines saying “Sengled to Pay $20 Million to Affected Customers” and you will think you are finally getting justice. Here is the reality. That settlement will be gutted by lawyer fees before it ever reaches you. By the time it is split among all claimants, your so‑called justice will arrive in the mail 18 months later as a check for 87 cents. If they really want to spit in your face, they will make it a coupon for a discount on more Sengled junk.
Why They Will Not Feel It
This will not hurt Sengled in any real way. It will be a line item on a budget, nothing more. They will quietly move on to selling some other cheap connected product that will also be abandoned the moment it is inconvenient to keep it alive.
At best you will get the satisfaction of giving Sengled the middle finger while buying literally any other brand of smart bulb. You will get to explain to your friends how this “great deal” you told them about turned into an expensive lesson in why cloud reliant tech is a gamble.
Final Word
Sengled did not just kill their own product. They left their customers in the dark with no explanation and no respect.
When that class action hits, remember that you are not getting justice. You are getting pocket change, so lawyers can go buy another German luxury car for their kid.
If you are replacing your bulbs, skip anything that depends on a shaky overseas cloud and go with something like the WiZ A19. It is made by the same company behind Philips Hue, so you are buying into a proven ecosystem instead of a no‑name gamble. It does not route your control through a random cloud server in China. Instead, it connects directly to your network and supports Matter for local control.
You still get full color control, tunable white light, robust scheduling, voice control with Alexa and Google, and solid long‑term reliability without the risk of your smart home dying the day a foreign server goes dark.
At the end of the day, like you, I waited. Hoping for this to be resolved. But let’s just call it for what it is. Dead. Make the switch. Do some research like I did and let Sengled die the horrible death it deserves after ghosting God knows how many customers.
