Good question, and one frequently discussed in the forums.
SmartThings does poll the Hue bridge every five minutes or so, and so it will update the bulb status at that time. So while it doesn’t know what the dimmer switch did, the statuses in the app should be updated fairly soon after the dimmer switch was used.
Whether that meets your particular needs or not just comes down to the details.
We use it as a parallel means of control, mostly in the guestroom where it’s a very intuitive switch for guests to use. It works fine that way for us. We don’t need an immediate status update for those particular lights.
I also have one on my refrigerator which my service dog can use, and again, in those circumstances I don’t care whether the SmartThings app doesn’t update status immediately as long as it gets there pretty soon.
There are other devices which can give you immediate update if you prefer that. So it just depends what you need.
There are some community members have been attempting to use the hue dimmer switch as a “button controller” so SmartThings would be aware of the button presses, but so far they have not been able to get it to work. The following thread discusses that project:
