Which LOTUSLAMP app do I need?

We build the controllers inside these lights and we write the apps that drive them. This page maps every product category we manufacture to the app that actually controls it.

Maintained by Long-Term New Media Limited · Last reviewed July 2026

Picking the wrong app is the single most common reason a light "won't connect". The apps are not interchangeable: each one speaks a different control protocol, and an app that cannot speak your controller's protocol will simply never list your device — even when Bluetooth is working perfectly and the light is powered on.

Work through the three questions below. If you already know your product category, skip to the full reference table.

Step 1 — What kind of light is it?

Start with the physical form, because that alone resolves most cases.

Step 2 — If it is a strip, does colour move along it?

This is the distinction that decides between our two colour apps, and it is the one customers get wrong most often. Power the strip up on whatever mode it ships with and watch it.

If it is a bulb — the pairing works differently

A bulb is the one category where there is no separate controller to identify. The control electronics sit inside the lamp, the phone talks to the bulb over Bluetooth directly, and there is no data line, no line sequence and no chain order to get wrong. Almost the entire class of problems covered in wrong colours and line sequence cannot happen to a bulb.

What you trade for that simplicity is range and count. Bluetooth reaches a room, not a house, and each bulb is its own device — so twelve bulbs are twelve pairings, whereas twelve metres of strip on one controller is a single one. That distinction is what the next step is about, and it matters more for bulbs than for anything else on this page.

One more thing worth knowing before you start hunting for the right app: if a bulb shipped with a physical remote, that remote usually works independently of the app and will keep working even if the pairing is lost. It is the quickest way to confirm a bulb is alive before you blame the software.

Step 3 — How many lights are you controlling?

One light, or a handful you are happy to control one at a time, needs nothing special — stay with the app from Step 1 or 2.

Once you are running several fixtures that should behave as one installation — a whole room of ceiling lights, or lighting that should respond as a group — you want mesh networking instead of point-to-point Bluetooth.

The five main apps

Full reference — all 40 product categories

This is the complete mapping between the product categories we manufacture and the app that controls each one.

Lotus Lantern

LotusLamp X

Magic Lantern

iMeshting

LightsPlay

Other apps in the LOTUSLAMP family

Alongside the five above we publish a number of apps built for specific product lines and for partner brands that ship our controllers under their own name: LotusPixel, LotusScreen, LotusLamp CCT, LotusLamp Echo, LotusCloud, IoTLite, LIDU, BBT Lights, PixelsPlay and RgbPlay.

If your light shipped with a printed card, a QR code or packaging naming one of these, use that app — it is the build matched to your hardware. If your light came with no app named at all, work through Steps 1–3 above.

A note on paid look-alikes

Still not connecting?

If you have the right app and the light still does not appear, the cause is almost always one of a small number of things — Bluetooth permission, the light already being held by another phone, or the light not being in pairing mode.