Apps and control
We write our control apps in-house — sixteen of them. They are all free, and they are not interchangeable: each speaks a particular control protocol, and an app that cannot speak your controller's will never list your light at all.
Start with the right app
Which app controls your light?
Three questions, then a full table mapping all forty of our product categories to the app that runs them. If a light "will not connect", start here before anything else — the wrong app is the single most common cause.
Offline voice control: no account, no network, no cloud
Some fittings recognise spoken commands on a chip inside the light, with nothing uploaded and no assistant to pair with. What that is genuinely better at, the three things it gives up, and why false triggers matter more than how many phrases it knows.
Wireless stick-on switches: a switch without a wall chase
A battery switch that sticks where you want it and talks to the light directly. What it takes out of the job, the positions a wired switch cannot reach, two years on one battery, and the placement rules that keep the link solid.
Setup and troubleshooting guides
These are written from our own application documentation — the same source our support team works from.
Pairing a light for the first time
The three checks that turn most "it will not connect" cases into a non-event, a short video of the actual connection flow for each of the five apps, and a table for reading what a particular failure is telling you.
Colours come out wrong
Red showing as green is not a fault and not a broken strip. It is channel order, the strip and the controller disagreeing about which wire carries which colour, and it is corrected in the app in about thirty seconds once you know what you are looking at.
Music sync: three modes, and why the wrong one feels broken
There are three separate ways to drive lights from sound — your phone's music library, your phone's microphone, and a microphone built into the controller itself. Most reports of "music sync doesn't work" are the wrong mode, and the one most people want is the one nobody finds.
The five main apps
Lotus Lantern
Single-colour & CCT
LotusLamp X
Full-colour RGB
Magic Lantern
Addressable RGBIC
iMeshting
Mesh networking
LightsPlay
Entertainment & music
| App | Built for |
|---|---|
| Lotus Lantern |
Single-colour and tunable-white strips, and most decorative strings — Christmas lights, copper-wire strings, camping, eave and sky ceiling lighting |
| LotusLamp X |
Full-colour RGB strip where the whole run changes colour together, plus car lighting, TV backlighting, sunset lamps, water ripple units and dedicated drivers |
| Magic Lantern |
Addressable RGBIC lighting, where colour travels along the strip — including curtain lights, firework lights and pixel strings |
| iMeshting |
Mesh networking: room grouping, multi-fixture control, ceiling fan lights and offline voice control |
| LightsPlay |
Entertainment-led effects, running-water controllers and music interaction |
Others in the family
Alongside those we publish LotusPixel, LotusScreen, LotusLamp CCT, LotusLamp Echo, LotusCloud, IoTLite, LIDU, BBT Lights, PixelsPlay and RgbPlay, each built for a particular product line. We also produce white-label builds for partner brands who ship our controllers under their own name — so an app with an unfamiliar name may still be one of ours underneath.
If your light arrived with packaging, a card or a QR code naming a specific app, use that one: it is the build matched to your hardware.
Every one of our apps is free
There is no paid tier, no subscription and no unlock fee for any feature in any app we publish. If an app asks you to pay to control your lights, it is not ours, whatever it is called. Check the developer name on the store listing before installing.
Where the app is not the answer
Worth saying, because it saves people a lot of time. A control app cannot change what the hardware is able to do. Three limits come up constantly:
- A plain RGB strip cannot chase. All its LEDs share three connections, so they physically cannot show two colours at once — see how flow effects work.
- A Bluetooth strip cannot follow what is on your television. There is no path for the picture to reach it. What is on offer instead is sound reaction, which is a different thing — bias lighting versus colour sync.
- Single-panel curtain lights cannot be linked into one screen. Linking is a property of the controller, not a setting — curtain variants explained.
Still in the pipeline
We publish these as they are finished rather than listing titles that do not exist yet. Next up: first-time pairing checks, grouping lights by room, offline voice control, and scenes and timers.
If you have a control question we have not covered, tell us — support questions are where these pages come from.