I just recently got a Phillips Hue bridge and some Generation 3 bulbs. More than half the time, when I turn them off, I can’t turn them back on from the Hue app or SmartThings app. They just say unreachable.
The only thing that works is to manually cycle the lamp switch twice to get them to turn on white. Then, I can control the color from the Hue app or the on/off from the ST app.
My bridge is at least 15 - 20 feet away from my router. Very frustrating.
I don’t have the generation three bulbs, so I can’t speak to those.
With the generation one and two, the hue bridge has been one of my most stable and reliable home automation systems.
But the SmartThings/hue integration has itself been really flaky, lots of changes, lots of new problems with every change.
So there are several possible points of failure. I’d start by just setting it up without any smartthings integration and use it with its own app, any other third-party app that you like, and IFTTT , and see how it works then.
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Also, I forgot to ask-- is the bridge round (GEN one) or square GEN two)? In either case, if it is still flaky when you are using it without SmartThings, I would contact Philips support, reliability is supposed to be one of their main selling points. 
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I’ve got gen3 Hue’s.
They work perfectly every time, either using the Hue app or with Alexa.
The problems seem to appear when using them with Smartthings and then bulbs start becoming unreachable.
I’ve only seen my bulbs showing as unreachable once since the issue was closed on the Smartthings status page on the 28th October though.
Before that it happened everyday for weeks.
If it starts again I’m cutting my losses with Smartthings.
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Gen 1 bridge. (Round). That’s an interesting point - maybe I will try to remove them from ST. I suppose I could build a virtual switch that fires and IFTTT recipe turning Hues on/off.
I had always heard how reliable Hue was. I was actually pulling my Zigbee lights out of ST and connecting them through Phillips, then back into ST. I thought that this would give me a more stable Zigbee mesh. Oh well - we’ll see.
I have never had a problem with the Hue bulbs when using Philips’ app. I have had horrible problems with ST trying to talk to them for the last few months. Thankfully ST has pushed several updates that seems to have reestablished everything.
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I’ve been having issues lately with SmartThings losing communications with my hue hub. I opened one support ticket with a resolution of turn off the smartthings hub and hue hub and turn them back on again.
I think I am going to open another ticket soon as this has happened almost every 5 days for the past 3 weeks.
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So I went the route of deleting all Hue stuff from SmartThings. Then I created a virtual switch called “Hue 1, 2, etc”. Then I used IFTTT rules to make the Hue lights work. Sloppy, but it works pretty well.
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And they stayed responsive once you took smartthings out of the picture?
I had heard elsewhere that too frequent heartbeat checks were interfering with the GEN three bulbs, but I didn’t want to say anything because I don’t know for sure. I haven’t seen any official confirmation of that. But SmartThings checks the heartbeat every five seconds, which is really frequent. So if there is a problem, you could see it there. Basically the heartbeat request would be causing some bulb check ins to get lost, which is why the bulb then looks like it’s unresponsive.
Yes, the bulb worked properly in the Hue app instantly. Not sure what the reason it, but it just IS. Also, the first IFTTT recipe took about 10 minutes to start working reliably. Then, all of the subsequent ones were pretty immediate. The response time for pushing the ST button and the light working is pretty good.
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Interesting idea, but I’ve had bad luck with IFTTT latency in the past. The Hue bulbs work great normally between hue hub and smartthings hub, We seen this kind of stuff in the past. SmartThings breaks, SmartThings fix.