Why do my Govee lights still phone home even with LAN control turned on?

Yeah, that's exactly how it works, and your observations match mine. The LAN control checkbox only adds a local control path, it doesn't cut the cloud connection. The lights keep a persistent connection to Govee's servers pretty much 24/7, and when that connection hiccups, the whole thing gets flaky, including the local side. I saw the same behavior during an outage at my place. Lights dropping, reconnecting, the app losing track of them even though nothing on my network changed. The local mode is basically riding on top of the cloud setup rather than replacing it. I tried blocking them at the firewall to see what would happen. They stayed on my VLAN but refused outbound traffic, and they got even more unstable. Some models would eventually stop responding on the local side entirely until I let them phone home again. So fully cutting them off isn't really a supported state, which tells you where thier priorities are.

What actually worked for me was putting them on Home Assistant with the local integration. That gives you control that stays inside your house, but the catch is you lose the Govee app features when you go that route. No scenes from their app, no their-specific effects, just the core controls. For basic on/off, brightness, and color it's fine, but it's a tradeoff you need to know about going in. For the strip lights specifically, if keeping them off the internet is a dealbreaker, swapping the controller is the cleaner fix. There are open source controllers that run entirely local, and you can even find prebuilt ones now, so it's less soldering and fiddling than it used to be. Bulbs are harder since you can't really crack those open and swap anything.

Before you buy more sets for the bedrooms, I'd decide which matters more: the Govee app experience or true local control. You can't really have both with these. If local is the priority, the bulbs are the ones I'd skip.

Huh, this kind of explains what happened with my Govee floor lamp last month. I thougt the thing was broken because it randomly ignored me one evening, but that was the same night our cable internet was down. Never put two and two togehter untill reading this. I'm new to all this smart light stuff, so maybe a dumb question, but is this just how cheap wifi bulbs are in general? I picked up some off-brand bulbs for the porch and they seem to act up when the internet is slow too. Starting to wonder if I wasted my money trying to avoid the big brands when they're all doing the same thing anyway.

This whole thread is making me rethink the two sets I was about to order. One thing I keep wondering about is the timers and schedules. If the lights are constantly checking in with their servers, do the schedules still fire on time when the internet is down, or do they miss too since everything gets shaky? I use timers way more than I use the app itself, so that would matter more to me than the fancy color effects. Also curious what swapping the controller on a strip actually involves, is that just unplugging the strip from the little box it comes with and plugging it into a diffrent box?

Seconding the Home Assistant route. I moved my two light bars over to the local integration last spring and the random disconnects basically stopped once I firewall blocked their outbound stuff. One thing to know though, the local API only works on certain newer models and it has rate limits, so if you poll them too often they get grumpy and ignore commands for a bit. I hit that with a fast color loop effect and had to slow my polling way down. Worth checking the model list before you commit.