I'd suggest using Room Lighting to create groups (the app is a bit complex, but it does groups and scenes as well as room lighting automations). The old Groups and Scenes apps have been superseded and are now legacy at this point.
Some specifics on Zigbee groups:
So I have used the Room Lighting App to group these lights in multiple ways. Here is the screen:
In addition, here is the detail on how I set one of these up. Is this what you mean by grouping or is there something in addition to this? This will activate all of the lights at once. It does have the popcorn affect, but it does turn all the lights on and off together.
I was able to get all 15 lights in the main room paired. It probably too 8-10 hours of tinkering with them. Once I got most of them connected, I had to factory reset 3 lights by pulling them out of the ceiling and disconnecting the wires, turn on the power, tap the hot wire against the terminal to reset and then connect the wires back. Doing this hot was not the safest plan, but it stopped me from completely re-wiring the lights and pulling them down to a bench. They really need to put a reset button on these since they are designed to be hard-wired.
I have yet to use Room Lighting, because I’ve had such good results using Groups with Motion Lighting, Button Controller, etc., but if you’re getting a popcorn effect it sounds like it isn’t using zigbee group messaging. I use Groups to turn off the entirety of the downstairs lights and every room turns off at once without the popcorn effect.
You should install a smart switch then simply cap off the rest of the 3/4 way boxes then replace the switches in there with decora scene controllers. This way you can retain the 4 way switches, maintain power to the lights, and reset if need be.
That is the plan. I just don't have the switches yet. My main concern is that I am sure I will need to reset these in the future and the only way to do that will be to pull them out of the ceiling. At this point, I'll deal with that when it occurs.
Did I use the correct app to control these lights as shown above? Is there a setting to help with popcorn effect? I keep reading that the group and scenes is the old way of doing things. This room lighting interface was much simpler to set up than scenes, but just trying to use the intended solution correctly.
Create a group then an activator to turn on/off the group instead of a rule that turns on the lights individually.
Fill in a value for Command with Activator Device. This creates a device with that name. In your case it will create a dimmer device that you can/should use to control all your lights at once.
Under Activate Lights Options you need to
'Zigbee group commands' is what eliminates the popcorning as it sends a single signal to all the lights.
Another useful post:
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