Hue was the first good multicolor LED bulb. The only way to have color control without a total home rewiring means you need wireless tech.
They were originally zigbeeLL devices in 2012. You could use something like HomeSeer or Wink as a multi-platform controller or use the Hue hub, which had a RESTful api and its cloud connection for remote access. (HomeAssistant was not released until a year later)
Then Philips/Signify slowly went evil. They broke compatibility with ZigbeeLL in different ways (had the hubs reject non-hue devices, made the bulbs out of spec so other hubs couldn't use them, etc) until they got called on it. Their zigbee stack got so janky that they have a (if not the only) "virus" in the zigbee realm. (It's more like a "contagious" buffer overrun, iirc)
Hue then started releasing non-zigbee devices (Bluetooth & wifi) which are easier to vertically integrate as the API is private.
Now they are using the apps as a way to force hub updates. This is much like a Wink "update" that added code requiring a subscription.
Zigbee devices can be moved to ther hubs but the Bluetooth & wifi ones are a whackamole game of Hue vs the reverse-engineers.