Nowadays, companies see the users of their platforms as captive audiences, and they try to extract as much money from them as possible.
This completely destroyed the resale value of this product as well. It's not a product we own, but it's their product we happen to use, and we're still subject to all kinds of ads and traps for subscriptions etc.
I'm on holiday at the moment so reopened the app to transfer photos from my camera directly to my phone again after a while of not using it (at home I just use the microsd card readers in my computers). Anyway, I discovered Canon now has a mandatory account requirement. There wasn't even an account option when I bought the camera. Luckily the old apk from APK mirror still works on my phone.
A $100 scale isn't really that captive, especially if continuing to use it costs that much per year. There's no shortage of scales for tracking weight loss and the Apple health integration in my Withings is pretty useless from experience.
Yes, it's not as captivating as a $1,200 iPhone or $4,000 MacBook Pro. But we're talking about habits, and gradual changes and engagements.
However, once you're within a system, and used to interacting with it on a daily basis, you would lean towards their slight nudges and pushes, and over time subscribe to a $2/month service, or their "new solutions" etc.
Not to forget their continued advertisements in the app, and constant pushes. You're no longer a customer that purchases a product, but instead a captive audience that is constantly being engaged and steered towards one thing or another.
I have a $100 Garmin scale as well as a watch [1] and some similar devices and it seems like a good value to me but many people I know say "gee, that's expensive!"
I am really impressed with my Apple hardware but the services strike me as uniformly shoddy and dare I say a lifestyle brand that seduces people into treating garbage as if was gold. Ok, I like what they did with Foundation, I really do, but I think Apple Health, Apple Home and all of those things are for suckers and Withings probably thinks so too. For all I know Apple is charging them an arm and a leg to participate. On the other hand, Garmin Connect takes my active lifestyle seriously.
[1] with 100% satisfaction after discovering third party charging cables!
The official charging cable is atrociously unreliable, enough that I almost gave up on the brand, but there are numerous third party charging attachments like
I'm a cheapskate so I'd probably make a shortcut so I can say "siri, log my weight at 165 lbs" and have that put my weight into apple health or a spreadsheet. It's a bit more friction, but if the data is useful that's what I'd do. If I find that I'm not using the shortcut, then the data probably isn't useful.
You don’t even need a shortcut: “hey dingus, log a weight of 156.3” and it gets logged to HealthKit. Just did it minutes ago (because I long ago gave up on getting that Withings scale to do the same).
Honestly one of my new favourite uses for AI. Little things I wouldn't ordinarily complain about I can now engage the regulatory state on. (Currently pursuing LG under Wyoming's wiretapping statute.)
Though heading that off might be why this is only "starting from October 13th, 2026" and in respect of "any new Withings account."
As for the timing... If you BOUGHT the product before October 13th and simply didn't activate an account yet - then it might still be worthy of a complaint. I'm not saying they are actively false advertising, I haven't checked every one of their store fronts after all. But it is a valid path for someone who did get swindled.
> Honestly one of my new favourite uses for AI. Little things I wouldn't ordinarily complain about I can now engage the regulatory state on.
And public service is getting swamped with petty little BS in return. Even if the substance has merits (and most doesn't, because AI systems are yes-men that don't push back like an actually trained lawyer would), they have to spend sooooo much time reading and digesting all the AI written fluff plus checking if stuff like cited court cases actually exists.
Then perhaps they know the true scale of consumer complaints once friction to file is removed, they can take better actions to reduce those complaints.
> they can take better actions to reduce those complaints
Nine out of ten times companies settle because (a) the claims have merit and (b) it costs them more to go in front of a regulator than it does a consumer.
If you bought from a big-box retailer and you’re considering ditching ecobee because of this, you should try to return them. Even if you’re outside the return policy, if you’re pleasant to the customer service staff they might be able to help you.
Amazon reviews are essentially meaningless at this point, the important un-fakeable stat is return rates. Brands care, and retailers track it and will drop products with high return rates.
> #3 - If you haven't reviewed the product on Amazon, you should warn other users with a review
I've warned users of many such instances of false claims, and safety issues with products. As a consequence, I've been banned from reviewing, and all my past reviews have been removed.
I've stopped trusting reviews altogether. They're to easily gamed - dishonest competition and clients posts fakes. Dishonest businesses dispute all negative reviews(and most disappointed customers don't have the time to fight it).
Reviews just don't work when the user pool goes below a certain "average honesty level"
amazon famously let you swap products of an id/ad/product without loosing the reviews so you can even find literal unrelated reviews under such fake product amazon listing pages
I had a similar experience with tado that tried to paywall a basic temperature control of a smart thermostat. Their ratings got trashed and they pulled back.
Why do they even bother? This is going to hit the front page of every health/fitness/cycling/running blog site, there will be a big stink for a few weeks, then Withings will quietly (or loudly, "we've heard you!", as if they were listening in the first place) get rid of it. And they'll waste all this time, money, and customer goodwill for nothing, because no one could have possibly seen this backlash coming.
Doesn't matter to me, neither their POS blood pressure cuff nor their scale will sync to HealthKit anyway (oh, how I've tried), I'm not losing anything. So stomping my feet with "I'm never buying another Withings product!" won't make any difference, I was not going to buy their POS products again anyway. :-)
I used to have issues with my Withings scale not syncing to HealthKit, but I just checked and it had all of my weightings in there just fine. Can't even remember the last time I checked the Withings app.
Will they get rid of it? It seems more likely that they'll do damage control to wait out the news cycle (the official comment on the linked post is an excellent example of corporate deflection) and change nothing.
This change sucks (but as a long time Withings user doesn't affect me... for now), but I haven't had trouble with either the scale or BP cuff syncing to Apple Health. I don't have any suggestions besides double-checking the Withings app has permissions to write to HealthKit. I don't see any settings in the Withings app itself besides a prompt to check "Settings > Privacy > Health > Withings App".
Sorry if this isn't helpful.
Aside: all BP cuffs and their apps sorta seem to suck when it comes to sync. I also have an Omron. At least mine measure accurately. Make sure to validate yours with your GP.
... the process of validating the accuracy of my home BP monitor reminded me of the Physics 510 lab I did in graduate school!
Omrons do their primary job well but you run into the "IT is where great brands go to die" phenomenon that you run into everywhere -- like the stay I had at a Hilton where the staff was great but between bad wiring and bad React apps the IT experience was shoddy... Staff would be held accountable if they did a bad job but problems with IT are treated like the weather, something nobody can do anything about.
I do appreciate your feedback, thanks. I just don’t worry about it anymore because I can just as easily say, “hey dingus, record a body weight/blood pressure reading of…”. I wish I’d figured that out after wasting time to get synch to work. :-)
Okay, mean, but I’ve done consulting at a Big 3 and the MBA kids are bananas. They’re incredibly hard-working but have the ethics of a second-hand Kallax that’s too wobbly to stand.
If all you want is the one mesasurenr, no reason to use HealthKit.
If you want to graph resting heart rate against steps per week over a year or two, that’s when HealthKit adds value. Or if your blood pressure cuff and scale are different brands and you want to see combined data.
Because the expected lifetime value of the $40 scale sold just shot up to well over $200. If 50% of customers stop buying the $40 scales and the other half start paying $99 annually, this is an absolutely no-brainer from a revenue perspective
I dropped my Withings stuff after constantly dealing with inconsistent syncing behavior. I got a body fat percentage weight scale and a blood pressure cuff from essentially no-name brands on Amazon, and both sync instantly every time. The blood pressure cuff doesn't even require me to have the app open on my phone.
Tough to beat compared to Withings' system, which seemed to rely on everything going to the cloud, then going back to your phone, THEN Apple Health, if you're lucky. With each of those steps being on whatever interval it decides.
My Body+ syncs quite well now, after they fixed whatever hiccup it had with losing Wi-Fi credentials.
That said, more than once it has synced the entire family’s account to MY Apple Health data, which is infuriating.
I was considering their Scanwatch 2, but I dunno… After returning the sleep sensor and the occasional hiccup with the Body+, I think Withings has lost my business.
Shame, can’t just keep their products working without getting into all sorts of AI and subscription shenanigans.
You may not monetize built-in capabilities provided by the hardware or operating system, such as Push Notifications, the camera, or the gyroscope; or Apple services and technologies, such as Apple Music access, iCloud storage, or Screen Time APIs.
I'm not seeing how that would be a violation. Youtube has never been a "download files to my device" service. It has always been a "stream video from our servers" service. I don't see how the fact that they added the ability to save a file and gated it by a subscription would be a violation.
This isn’t about downloading videos for offline use but about background playback.
YouTube recently blocked the ability to play a video in the background (or with the screen turned off) unless you pay for premium. It just turns off the video if you leave the app, unlike other media on my iPhone.
AFAIK you can open the video in Firefox, which allows you to stream in the background. of course not that seamless, but at least there's still a work-around.
I haven’t been able to do background play in YouTube without Premium for at least 4 years. I also recall finding Reddit threads of people having the same issue.
Just because someone broke the rule in the past, persisted in breaking the rule and is still breaking the rule today doesn't mean they get a free pass to break the rule.
Did you know that it's technically against the Apple TOS to use push notifications for advertising without allowing end users to opt out of the advertising part without removing functionality, even though it's never enforced and massive companies do it all the time?
Even Apple themselves do it, I see apple send me push notifications that are ads for Apple Arcade all the time.
The fee is to unlock something on their own back end, triggered by using a non Apple device. So Apple’s license probably doesn’t apply (the corner case that could cause it to apply is the app generating a key and sending it to the Withings infrastructure, I suppose).
This only applies if the sole reason of the purchase is to gate an apple capability. If the purchase does more than that, literally anything, you can gate all the apple parts on an iPhone.
Fun story: when I got my Withings watch 5-6 years ago couldn't get it Bluetooth paired with my phone. Contacted support.
Me: hey bluetooth pairing isn't working I've tried A, B, C and here's additional context.
Withings support: [over 24 hours later] Have you tried A? :)
Me: ...Yes?
Withings support: [over 24 hours later] Have you tried B? :)
Me: As I said initially, yes. Can you please batch things to try to expedite this since replies are so slow?
Withings support: [over 24 hours later] We have to do this in order. :) Have you tried having a different phone even though your phone meets our listed requirements? :)
Me: .....................
Me: I debugged it myself in Android dev mode and got it working, I had to do X, perhaps you can relay the issue to your engineers. Thanks for nothing.
Withings support: [over 24 hours later] oh
And as a bonus after an update a couple years ago it looses track of time within a couple weeks and has to be manually set.
Very pretty product once upon a time with horrid customer service and software.
I can’t wait till somebody figures out how to reverse engineer these with a LLM so we can just sync the scale data ourselves. I purchased one of these devices, but I am somewhat regretting my decision now.
This is the unfortunate truth. I've gone through 2 Withings scales because the battery basically had planned obsolecense. Then I bought a Quardio smart scale, but the company went bankrupt and all cloud syncing went down. Meanwhile my mom's $20 dumb scale works perfectly fine.
These days it's not true that if you pay for the item, you're the customer. Now you're just a potential revenue stream.
Do the newer ones have rechargeable batteries? I thought even my new one used AAA's. I have one from 2012 that's still kicking. Aside from this rugpull I've been very happy with Withings.
Here is a starting point. It includes a link to instructions on how to reverse engineer a Bluetooth scale[0], and it looks like someone dumped some data already.
True but it's good to see access to our own devices democratized, for once.
It isn't far short of magical to watch Opus hack a piece of connected hardware. Everybody should try to take advantage of that capability at least once, if only to see it in action before they nerf it.
I've had pretty good luck using Google Appscript to either access web APIs or screenscrape, then parse into a Google Sheet (which I either use as-is or as the source to populate a web app).
I'm not as optimistic. I think we're in a very small golden window and once companies catch on that reverse engineering is taking off in a big way, they're going to panic and start demanding cryptographically-sealed binaries with remote attestation everywhere. And they'll probably get it, because what the consumer wants barely matters anymore.
I also think it will be a short window. I can already imagine the convoluted encryption algorithms and weird stuff the big companies will put in place to stop us from cracking their software and so on, but at least in the meantime, and with legacy devices, there will be fun to be had...
I can't help but feel that something soon gonna break, and break big. Like, the decompilation stuff either gonna get criminalized, or forbidden in training, or I don't know. Current state of affairs became super imbalanced, where I can decompile 400k+ lines big game in a weekend and rip it's engine; or, as pointed in sister thread, as someone cloned music processor device in 2 hours.
I'm also surprised when reading stuff here like "agent harness app %X% is a new moat!". I mean, I can point even GPT itself on their own new app and it happily obliges in dumping all features, writing product doc or disassembling itself.
Not that I want it -- my tokens are not free -- but it's here. Up for grabs.
What AI are you using? Image generators are kinda like this but AFAIK no LLMs do this. Maybe a little or warning about copyright at most for specific use cases.
Local AI will be made illegal under the guise of security, and then they'll just purge anything "revolutionary" from services. The endgame currently getting pushed by the big players is pretty obvious.
It'll be made illegal in the same way piracy is. Major platforms won't be able to host it but anyone who wants it will trivially be able to torrent the latest model and do whatever they want.
Other countries won't care and let people reverse engineer away.
We've been having an existential crisis in the SaaS industry for at least six months now. See stock prices and internal panic. The recent recreation of the Adobe suite (the hard way, not a decompile) is the nail in the coffin. A company worth $98B just had its most valuable software copied by one guy with a laptop. Software patents have always been difficult or impossible to secure and defend, all over the world. So there is little legal protection.
On the one hand, everyone gets all the software they could ever want now. That's cool. On the other hand, the entire profession and industry is soon worthless. That's a lot of lost jobs and companies. We are not ready for this level of change this fast.
Have you looked at the issues page on Github?
Looooooooong way to any recreation, and I doubt anyone is even wanting to walk that way.
It was all for hype, and hype it got.
Bugs yes, but it's also free. Most features are strikingly close to the official suite. Again, this was done by one guy with a laptop. If more people participated, or he spent more time and effort on this, and/or the LLMs get even better (which they are), most of those bugs would also be gone. This is a proof of concept which proved the concept.
I think it's also worth touching on the concept of good enough. Most studios have been building software which is FAR past good enough. Most people use a few features in any given app and rarely venture outside of that. Most people never experience any of the recorded bugs. They're just trucking along. I think this Adobe suite clone is good enough for most people.
There are other free and not that buggy alternatives. Features mean nothing it cannot export the result right.
It is not a proof of concept, it is a dancing bear - yes, it if fun to see a bear dance, but it dances terribly still.
The money spent on tokens to make it useable would buy you lifetime Adobe subscription...
Pretty sure it's already possible. I have a small service running on homelab that syncs all the withings data to garmin. Has needed no attention in years and just works.
I give it at most a week. People freed the Whoop pretty quickly. I mean, you could probably do it yourself if you have the time and an LLM, it's probably not that locked down.
I was actually in the market for a scale to replace my Wyze (still works, but the app is just not very reliable) and was strongly considering a Withings Body Smart.
With Withings firmly off the list, what's the best alternative for something that's accurate and reliably syncs with Apple Health?
Same here - £17 in the UK three years ago and it's been... fine.
It takes normal AA batteries (which I've had to replace only once), the results tally up with the properly-calibrated scale at my gym, and the app doesn't have any particular annoyances. I'm on Android and it syncs fine with Google services, but it claims to do Apple Health too.
Honestly, it's one of the better pieces of tech I've bought in the past few years, and I don't see how a fancier / more expensive brand could be noticeably better.
I guess this will lead to more companies relying on strong crypto to maintain control over their devices rather than relying on the amount of work required to reverse engineering them.
I don't see the appeal of heated seats, I've never turned the ones in my cars on. OK, I suppose when you've left your car in below zero weather it's useful.
Heated steering wheel on the other hand; that's heavenly.
I suppose if I ever find a BMW attractive enough to buy one despite this consumer-hating behavior (their grilles help me stay away), I'd figure out if I can unplug the seat from the control unit, and just plug it straight to a different power supply to get the heat. Or will they use something like HDMI's Digital Content Protection to prevent "heat piracy"?
If you do not have a garage and live in a cold weather climate they are fantastic. Heat up almost instantly when the engine might not warm up entirely to get the heat going for a good 15 min.
> Heated steering wheel on the other hand; that's heavenly
Twice I tried it on rental cars it freaked the hell out of me. This is what I'd imagine people experiencing some exotic neurological collapse feel like - part of hands feeling warm, while surrounding bits feeling frozen. Mixed signaling, really bizarre dissonance. So now when I get a new car, I get pretty much every option except for the heated steering wheel.
It's funny, I have heated steering wheel in my car (2022 Leaf), and when I bought it I didn't think anything of it. However, being in Scandinavia, when the first snow+ice came, I tried it and loved it instantly. Now I even use it on not very cold days, just because it feels nice. :)
I have some sorta skin condition that I can not stand either the heated seats and the heated steering wheel.
But my wife ... in winters, the first thing on entering the car is to activate the heatings seats. Some people like them. And yes I paid for the subscription (or a package that cost me a bunch but gave me everything all inclusive).
I don't think either of those are consumer benefits at all. And the hardware was charged for when the car was initially sold - it was part of the total unit cost of creation. The subscription was a consumer hostile way of increasing spend with the brand. The genius' at BMW looked at Tesla's Plaid mode and FSD and thought they could replicate that model but failed to realise that people don't view their brands the same way - people treat a Tesla like a software purchase, but a BMW like an expensive toaster.
I think you misunderstand - they can charge slightly less for the car, and not actually charge you for that bit of hardware, if they're monetizing it differently.
This constant appeasing of investors makes me really sad so here’s a message for the Withings PR team, I know you guys are reading this. I will never in a million years, not when hell freezes over, pay 100 dollars to you. I use the synching now, it’s nice, but you’re really over evaluating how I would not be able to just write a 3 digit number directly in apple health. It takes 10 seconds. If I am enoyed enough, I’ll just hack it and bypass your app completely. I.OWN.THE.DEVICE.
I have a Withings sleep sensor. They recently sent me a marketing mail, based on my previous night’s sleep, with a pitch to improve my sleep through a paid program. I had already opted out of marketing emails so their unsubscribe link had nothing to unsubscribe from.
Is anyone doing scales, sleep sensors, and BP cuffs that don’t use the cloud at all?
If you have an Android phone you can use Gadgetbridge which is an alternative app to sync your smart devices. It keeps all data on your phone. They support lots of devices, I use it with my Garmin smartwatch and I'm a happy user.
Likewise, Apple does not give Withings access to Apple Health's data, even with user permission.
So, I can understand why Withings does not want to be the one doing the hard work of data collection, while Apple is preparing its own subscription for Health services.
The “hard work of data collection”, it’s a fucking scale and it’s MY data, I paid for the hardware, it’s not Withings data at all. They knew the deal going in, Apple didn’t change the terms.
I’ve been a withings customer for just shy of 15 years. My original scale from 2012 is still kicking and I bought an upgraded one 2 years ago.
I will never pay Withings another dime if they keep up this bullshit and/or look for a way to hack the scale to have it talk to some self-hosted backend/app that does sync to Apple Health.
Surely, the user is doing all the hard work. The scale or whatever is just a tool to do so - like a ruler. Imagine if your measuring tape put the measurements you take behind a paywall.
And that will be the end of me buying anything more from Withings. Good job guys, I was happy enough with the scale, but I do not pay yet another subscription just to get the readings put into Apple Health. Bye.
I run a (web and native) app that integrates with Apple calendar and the like with per-user feed configuration. Due to the way Apple polls my servers, I am essentially hit with rolling 5 minute requests for every individual (non-negligibly sized) feed. The amount of bandwidth used at scale is not something I can just look at and shrug, and there are plenty of ways it could probably be made more efficient with levels of caching on near vs long-term items. I have to pass that cost on to my customer somehow. I wonder if this is something like that but at grander scale. There’s a lot of HIPAA compliance involved as well. Granted, I’m not charging a line item for that feature like they are here. I just roll it into the cost of the subscription and everyone shrugs because the price is justifiable to them.
Their software and hardware is of such low quality anyway, I will never buy another Withings product again. After using their scale and their thermometer, it's obvious they invest very little in quality control.
It's sad - I have an old Nokia branded scale and it's honestly still working great. The app itself got bloated and has performance issues - and became less useful.
I had a Withings watch and absolutely loved it. I considered buying another one after my old one got water damage. However, it was becoming evident from changes to the app that it was getting more and more locked down and ultimately was going to require a subscription for anything useful. At the same time, the app was getting buggier. At one point I lost multi years worth of data when I had to re-sync my watch to a new phone.
It's a shame because I liked their spin on a hybrid smart watch which looked like a traditional analog watch. Garmin does make hybrids, but to me they all look too sporty or tactical.
Sounds like some PM is jealous of Whoop and trying to launder the cost and boost adoption of their unwanted AI feature/subscription behind a heavily used existing feature.
I’m grandfathered-in (account created in 2013 or something like that) but I voted their app down to one star on the Apple App Store and stated they’re committing highway robbery.
Apple is adding ads to their services, and it looks like they're going to force Siri AI onto every recent-enough device they have. Don't get comfortable.
That's a shame, because the Withings Scanwatch 2 was of great help for us when a family member was waiting for heart surgery after a pulmonary edema. Having the watch reassure her every day was a big boost to morale. Thankfully, we did not have to test this, but it may also have been very useful had it picked a problem.
I have their sleep tracker, and one of the more annoying features is that you must open the app on your phone for it to sync sleep data to Apple Health. This is exactly the opposite of the convenience I had in mind when I bought the thing.
Other players in the field like Garmin are super restricted.
For my own use case i swapped to Health Connect (Android) though. Whatever might happen with that.
Of course i am also appalled about this change and also the pretty much non-response from the customer service in the forum about this, no good arguments have been mentioned.
In some cases, sensor data requires further transformation/processing. If you do it in the app, others who decompile your app can copy the implementation; if you put it behind an API, it makes it much harder.
Smart scales use BIA tech to figure out your bodyfat%, i think that's what most people use withings for, otherwise there are plenty of scales which can log your weight.
Even thought withings is garbage for bodyfat% estimation but plenty of noobs do not understand this.
Something that's getting particularly irritating is having to login to an app for functionality that should be between my phone and a Bluetooth device.
Sadly the better experience is at odds with most business models these days...
The Withings app has just got consistently worse and worse over the last few years. I just wanted some scales that would sync to my phone and record my weight over time.
Now the app is absolutely bloated and I can barely find my weight, and the syncing has become _much_ less stable, and the app is constantly asking me to sign in again.
Amazing how they were from good, to bad, to terrible.
Noticed this in the Withings app too. Sadly I've seen this trend with a lot of apps. For example 98% of the time I open the Audible app I want to play an audiobook, but they make you click multiple times. They want you to buy books, not listen to them.
There's also the the part where you had to opt in to unrestricted data collection to use the app. The app won't geocode data from the watch unless you set it to allow location tracking at all times, even when not using the app.
Got the Scanwatch on an employer discount deal with Withings, still wasted $180.
That's a popular take now, but is there any project of that kind that really got traction and use? (I am not talking about all-hype-no-substance like the Adobe one).
Well, crap. I really like Withings's scales. They're very nice and the results closely match medical equipment readings I've had, so in my experience they've been great for keeping track of things between checkups. Their privacy policy is (or at least was) one of the only ones I'd trust with medical data. The iOS app started to get annoying with its extra subscription features, which I couldn't care less about because I get them through other means.
But subscribing so that the scale in my bathroom, which syncs to the app in my phone, can sync to another app on that same phone? LOL, hell no. That simply will not happen. And even though it only applies to new users now, if there's not enough pushback that it loses them more business than it gains them, my official prediction is that within a year it'll cover new accounts, or new devices added to existing accounts.
I’ve had this for, I think, two or three years now and really liked the hardware in both aesthetics and battery life. Bought it after abandoning Fitbit when they became part of Google.
The software has become noticeable worse recently, and this is the last straw where I will actively recommend _against_ buying them. The brands doing enshitification has to stop and Withings is now one of them.
I got their blood pressure cuff for a couple years ago. I declined the setup and BT sync, partly from privacy, partly from apathy of "when will it break".
The cuff works well, I enter the numbers manually, no failures so far.
It's a pity. I still use my 12 year old Withings scale, and it works like a charm. Also have been using the Withings watch and Withings blood pressure monitor. Withings builds long lasting products that just work.
However, even if the sync for me as existing customer still works, I don't support paywalling basic functionality. Thus, for my future purchases I will choose a different brand. That's imho the only language companies understand: Lost revenue.
Dunno man, I just hop on the treadmill, do the thing for an hour, and hop off. Every day. I don’t need to count every single second or calorie I spend on it. Why all this paraphernalia around it all is needed is beyond me.
Reverse engineering doesn't help for iOS very much since even if you build your own version of their app with that feature unlocked, iOS doesn't allow you to sideload.
You'd have to pay $100/year for an apple developer account and then refresh the app every 14 days (since publishing your own hacked version on the appstore would plainly be a copyright and trademark violation, and if you use a developer account to load a developer version of an app on your device, you have to constantly refresh it).
Switch to one of the linux phones if you actually want to install software on your device.
And thus I reiterate my product request for health devices that can write straight to Apple Health without needing their own stupid app and account like Withings, or at the very least whose apps are little more than temporary data aggregators and writers to Apple Health that don’t require accounts or personal data.
Hm. I wonder if I can use a RPi Zero to read the console output of a medical scale and write it to Apple Health for my profile…
AH, you clearly haven't had the "5 different chargers breaking and begging support to send a different production batch". (And paying for every charger.)
My scanwatch is beautiful, and the battery life is great. But to this day, on my 5th charger, it either charges to full in 20m, or 3 hours. Same charger, same wall outlet. Probably not great for the watches hardware.
Unfortunately I've had. I've had two different scanwatch models and ended up buying ~3 chargers each for of them. Just thinking abut USB-C and how much less different chargers types I have makes me really happy.
I wish ios would allow sideloading because the current model makes this stuff not viable. Few people are going to pay $100/year to host a free reverse engineered app.
Is that my problem? I figured that WiFi access was enough to hit my phone to update HealthKit, but I never gave the scale access to the Internet ("you can go live over there on the IoT VLAN with the other tattletale devices").
Well, fuck that. Now I'm really, really, really not going to buy a Withings product again.
Mine died after a year, which I suspect is because my spouse used it after showers, and they’re not designed to handle bathroom moisture. Not even rated as water resistant.
Whoever wrote https://didac.dev/blog/i-made-my-withings-scale-sync-to-home... apparently got it working with Bluetooth LE and an esp32 chip. Sadly, they didn’t share their code yet, and as I lack their social media options I can’t email them requesting they post it. Perhaps they’ll see this comment, or perhaps someone else will repeat the solution and post it this time — but without the HealthKit path, there’s not much gain to be had over just manually typing the weight measured into the Health app.
It used to work that way but there was an update that forced it to go through their app and you needed to make an account. I had used mine for a couple years until this became a requirement then I just gave it away and went back to my dumb scale and manually entering the value into the Health app
The enshitification continues by making everything a subscription. Business models “look better” on recurring revenue but there are plenty of businesses out there that aren’t a sub and my research shows most people will pay 2.5x the yearly price as a once off. Maybe not for what Withings are offering though, since this is clearly extortionate
I have found the body fat estimator on the Withings mid-tier to be ludicrously off. I’m not convinced these scales offer much more than just the weight number itself, which isn’t very useful after a certain point.
For people looking for alternatives, I highly recommend the Beurer BF 720. It syncs with Bluetooth to the app, which doesn't require you to login. App syncs with Healthkit and that's it. Also works really well with multiple users who connect their own phones. And it's pretty affordable.
Only issue I've experienced is that background sync just stops working sometimes. Then I need to open the app manually to sync.
Withings opened my eyes. I’d been using cheap crappy devices that didn’t do much at all. “Upgraded” to withings and holy crap, the new user experience was a complete tour of my personal health data they wanted to ingest and control. I was finding no way to opt out. I couldn’t use the thing until I answered all the questions. It’s clear they’re all-in on vacuuming up data for their own purposes. I went back to a dumb scale and dumb bp cuff. I’d love to have things that automatically connect and record in my software of choice. But you can see what withings feels that costs them. They want you to pay not even to escape their confines, but just to allow your data to go to your own system. This shit has to end
I own a couple of Withings devices (a scale, and a blood pressure monitor) and this doesn’t affect me (for now!) as an existing user, but it still infuriates me. Saving my data in Apple Health is the *primary* reason I bought those devices.
Relatedly, I switched blood glucose monitor brands because my first device (Libre) did not sync to Apple Health: the data was locked in the device app where it was functionally useless to me and my doctor. So I switched to a more expensive brand (Dexcom G7) just so I could keep a complete history in Apple Health. If they ever remove or paywall that integration I will switch again.
I've had a scanwatch from withings for a few years and I've toyed with the idea of adding it to gadgetbridge. I think it might be time. I sense this will be quite a fast project with AI
Worst product i've ever owned that I feel completely duped on.
It's a hard feeling to explain, when purchasing any "high cost" tech device, I like to think i'm a smart consumer and do my research.
Nope. This company is, for back of a better word, disgusting. Never in my life have I had to maintain a profesional relationship with support agents for sake of:
-charger breaking repeatedly
-Syncing breaking repeatedlty
-BIometrics are completely, completely random and arbitrary compared to other professional devices.
-time desync
-Completely, baffling missing integrations. (I can't configure a god damn alarm?)
-The big one, dynamic paywalling. Since I purchased mine, I have been locked out of the few worthwhile features that the app/device initially offered.
The scanwatch 2 is completely useless as a watch and a health device. It is marginally acceptable as a fashion device.
For those who want to have a bottom line impact and have time & money to spare, purchase a scale or a blood pressure monitor from Apple Store online, try to set it up on your phone until you hit the new paywall, and then call and arrange to return it; when asked, explain that it requires a $100/year subscription for Apple HealthKit support and that you’re offended at Apple for omitting that. It’s quite possible that Withings made this change without notifying Apple, and a handful of such returns could lead Apple to pull all Withings products from their sales channels in response. Or it could just be wasted time, and Apple’s fine with it, but there’s no easier way to find out — and this sales channel is probably valuable enough to Withings that losing access to it might cost them their entire projected revenue gains from the fee.
This is sort of an old-man-yells-at-clouds comment, but I recently realized that most of the new stuff companies sell is pretty much a solution in search of a problem. Apple's whole announcement this past week was like this, but I'm feeling the same way about smartwatches, smart homes, and the like lately as well.
For most folks, I feel like spending 20 minutes a day on Darebee would be more effective than their $20/month subscription to their $600 smartwatch.
Darebee's a non-profit that's been around 15 years, and the founder of it intentionally changed its name to not be her identity because her mission is the fitness of real people.
My observation of people that are spending $600 on a special fitness watch and then a $20 month subscription to sync all of their health data and manage it with colorful graphs is they're not in better shape than the people that simply work out.
It's seems like the fitness equivalent of productivity porn.
Tell me, what part of your workout program you're pitching can inform me how much I weigh? How about my body fat percentage? Can it tell me my heart rate?
Darebee's a fitness nonprofit. I'm not pitching it. I just think it's the straightest line between zero and working out.
You don't have to know how much you weigh and you don't have to know your body fat percentage or even your heart rate to be effective at fitness. You don't need to buy equipment or have a special place to do it.
My point is the barrier to being fit is almost zero if you don't get distracted by all the shiny products they're selling.
This is intended to be an observation that applies to a general audience. I'm aware of elite athletes that require significantly more guidance to achieve the levels of performance they're looking for and I'm not trying to speak to any of that.
Right, and people looking to have a scale that can track their weight over the long term and graph and look at trends is looking for the exact same market product as a workout plan.
It's like walking into the apple store and asking to buy an iphone and some guy coming up to you and telling you what you really need is a copy of the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People"
My impression is that folks that buy smartwatches for workout tracking care about their fitness, and that all the metrics collected (steps taken, heart-rate in-the-zone, etc.) will use those metrics to tune a workout plan.
I was trying to point out that, for those folks, you can skip the middle step and just adopt a real workout plan created by fitness experts, and tested in real classes.
If your point is that there are a bunch of use cases for a fitness tracker/smartwatch that are not that, it's an interesting discussion to have, since my original comment made the assumption that the majority of customers focusing on those features were in fact using them to inform a workout plan/fitness plan (could be limited to diet, which Darebee also tries to address:
It's a really fantastic resource that doesn't ask for anything, so I thought it was worth mentioning in a thread about paying $99/year for Apple Health syncing.
Yeah, I'm sure there are some people who need to spend down their FSA or something. Withings ran the numbers and decided it was worth their return on investment, and they know way more about it than I do. However, I would not have guessed it would be enough to turn a profit.
I realized this week that most health tracking is absolutely bunk.
The most recent watchOS release (watchOS 27) has terminally altered my relationship with my Watch.
Apple adding the non-optional Smart Stack to watchOS 10 and moving the Control Center to the side button (used to be dedicated to the app switcher) was (is) massively annoying, but I made do with it.
Them adding the -- again, non-optional -- Quick Apps screen between the watch face and the App Grid *purely to support a bullshit AI feature that I DO NOT WANT* was inexcusable and put me on the edge.
It missing two alarms yesterday was the final straw that had me move the thing from my wrist to a drawer for the first time in ten years.
Every other smartwatch is a massive downgrade on iOS thanks to Apple being anti-competitively Apple. However, moving to Android will be just as massively disruptive to many of my daily workflows, and with Google locking Android up on every release and them culturally being even more "airplane the AI into your mouth" than Apple is, I don't think moving will be as beneficial as it seems in theory.
The other option, of course, was to roll the clock back to 2013 and abandon smartwatches altogether. (I was a Pebble backer and bought several while they were still around.)
So that's what I did. However, re-evaluating whether I actually _needed_ a device to capture my health metrics was a big sticking point in that decision.
I've long known that smartwatch calorie tracking has never been accurate -- too many variables related to biological makeup, and physicians never ask for HealthKit data anyway -- but there was a weird security and comfort that came with knowing that all of that was in Apple Health. (Don't get me started on sleep tracking!)
Living my life without a Watch these last two days has felt like losing an organ -- an appendix, more like. Not having a Watch sure feels liberating, though trying to make the iOS notifications system actually work for me is certainly a journey.
(I never realized how much of its clunkiness is by design. You can only set custom notifications for Mail, Calendar, calls and texts. Notifications for every other app falls into the "Default Alerts" bucket. There's no way to distinguish a ding from a ding from a ding by sound or feel (you can customize vibration patterns). You have to pick up the thing to look, but FaceID has already locked your phone...and you're deep in TikTok again. (I don't have TikTok but I could imagine this is how that cycle goes.)
As far as Withings is concerned. They created the first smart scale, which is genuinely useful (much less so iwth this change) but haven't been able to materialize much outside of that. Their smartwatches are too little, too late, and their more expensive scales are basically "we will sell you vibes and premium materials for loads; you should buy". This move feels a bit canary in the coalmine to me.
Withings can go ahead and charge for this. Either savvy people with Claude up an app to extract those data points from Withings into Apple Health anyway, or they'll roll the clock back further and just log weight with pen and paper which, as far as I know, are enshittification-proof.
I honestly don't have anything against them moving apple sync behind the paywall. It's really hard to justify doing any kind of ongoing maintenance and rnd from one-time sales. If they ship good durable things, there might not be enough people willing to buy that stuff, they're also forced to constantly find new customers.
They do need to keep up with API changes. But that’s not that hard. Even then, they could expose a stable local API so someone else can maintain the adapter.
Right, but they need to keep up with those changes to support their continuing sales anyway, so it’s “free” to keep supporting the existing installed base too.
Why would someone else maintain the adapter? Would they be charging for maintenance (or selling data / network) as well? What company should give their business to somebody else?
I assume writing and maintaining apps across all stack of devices is real work that someone has to do full time with a decent level of quality. Unfortunately, you can't just ship software and call it done, even without adding features, new devices are getting released, new OS versions are getting released, new security updates are getting released, server infra has to be maintained and patched.
I feel that all this work isn't getting appreciated and many think that this should be offloaded to somebody else to be done for free. They already offer a free app with free CSV export.
Also, they just might have taken on too much scope and paying for all that scope isn't sustainable from hardware sales alone, unless people continue to buy, but at some point all who would buy will have their devices and scope can't be covered anymore.
You need to keep paying influencers to promote it; otherwise, influencers threaten to promote other products and drop yours. Marketing is a big cost for these products.
Just like MacroFactor pays a lot of people to promote it, it has to pay people, which means the money has to come from the customers.
It's really hard to justify doing any kind of ongoing maintenance and rnd from one-time sales.
What kind of water-carrying excuse is that? Multibillion dollar companies have been created doing exactly that for decades. Withings has somehow managed to stay in business for nearly 20 years...doing exactly that.
I just don’t understand why companies think anyone would pay for that when there are alternatives. Or indeed even when there aren’t alternatives. $8/mo to save me typing in a number into apple health? In fact who even gives a shit about Apple health.
Oh. Wait. Apple does. Seems like a clever move Withings!
I replaced my deprecated Apple Watch Ultra with a Seiko 5 GMT. It has about two days of life on a single charge, and it takes me about 10 seconds to charge it each morning by winding the little knob on the side. It's pretty and has built-in Do Not Disturb mode.
I spent a decade with a smart watch. Then I took the ultimate step against enshittification. There's nothing to subscribe to on this thing, even if I wanted to, which I certainly don't.
Similar experience. Got the original Pebble, an Android smartwatch (a couple of them), and then the new Pebble, and I've concluded that my $30 Casio G-Shock does pretty much everything I want with zero-maintenance.
Why do people use these (watches, bands, smart scales) when they are so inaccurate? It's like believing in astrology!
I am convinced people go into the market with money and a desire to get scammed and never bother to check any claims companies make about their products.
Other than tracking steps and heart rate, they aren't accurate for the other things they claim to do.
I can't believe people are using these devices and believing they are accurate.
If you want an accurate body fat percentage measurement, get a DXA scan.
Good BIA devices from InBody that are anywhere near as accurate as DXA (still far off) cost thousands of dollars.
For impedance based machines, look up InBody 970/970S and how much they cost!
Believing your Withings smart scale is accurate at all for body fat percentage measurement is like believing in a unicorn.
And for body weight measurement, you can use any cheap Chinese scale, take a photo, and most agents can read the readings off the photo and log it for you in any app, no Health Connect or HealthKit needed!
how much precision you even need for bodyweight? Chinese cheap scales are good enough and mass produced, dirt cheap. Also, your bodyweight does can vary by as much as 1.2kg or 1% of BW on day to day basis simply due to changes in hydration, gut content or hormonal effects etc... You'll need to use a "weight trend" method something like EMA-14 or SMA-7 which many fitness apps use.
We use KTS-3 (Kalman Trend Smoother) in macrocodex free app for weight trend, it's slightly better than EMA-14 but visually it's much better for the users specially the ones who aren't good at reading a chart!
OK, so you want other apps to read this data? Read on.
How much effort is needed to write an app that can take a photo, read the display, and write it to Health Connect or HealthKit? Barely a few minutes!
The same is true for a blood pressure monitor. How often do you even use it? How much effort?
Do you really even need an API? LOL.
You can find a few studies on this:
>A 2020 systematic review by Fuller et al. found that consumer wearables often perform poorly at estimating energy expenditure, even when they measure steps and heart rate reasonably well. Across brands like Apple, Garmin, Polar, and Withings, calorie burn estimates frequently showed substantial error, often in the 15–40% range and sometimes exceeding 50%. Wearables can still be useful for tracking trends, but not for precise calorie calculations.
And at the end, if you are interested in "Calorie Expenditure" or TDEE or Maintenance Calorie tracking, our sensorless approach is much more accurate and we've a completely free app with 17,000+ users already! We basically use a Neural Network, see the method here:
https://macrocodex.app/knowledge/rethink/adaptive-tdee/
You can read reviews, and we guarantee results for weight loss or weight gain within 2–3 weeks (validation based on 17,000+ users), with no money, no ads served, and not even a name, phone number, or email (on Android) collected! Every user is just a number; no personally identifying information is collected.
It doesn't matter if a person has PCOD, thyroid issues, prediabetes, or is genetically resistant to fat loss: results within guaranteed 2–3 weeks and 80% will see results from the very first week! If you think our claim is outrageous, read the reviews :)
I have a Withings watch and this is a good thing. Do you really trust Big Tech with all your health data being synced? No. These people will use the data in absurd ways.
No, it's absolutely not a good thing. First, I trust Apple with my health data more than I trust Withings. They have many more billions to lose if it gets out that they're abusing PHI. Second, even if Apple were evil, that means Withings is charge you $100 to send your PHI to Apple. They're profiting off the evil.
There's no reasonable way to describe this as a good thing.
Sounds like they've been bought by private equity parasites. Why else would you do this?
Their clarification says all users will always be able to export csv etc - which I have done many times to analyse my sleep.
I don't really use HealthKit but out of principle I'm going to look into releasing a free tool that specifically syncs your free Withings export data into Apple Health.
#1 - If you bought the product with Apple Health sync in mind and it doesn't do that for free, file a complaint with your OAG. It's false advertising.
#2 - If you have the apps today, you should warn other users with a review (which may or may not be 1 star).
#3 - If you haven't reviewed the product on Amazon, you should warn other users with a review (which may or may not be 1 star).
Nowadays, companies see the users of their platforms as captive audiences, and they try to extract as much money from them as possible.
This completely destroyed the resale value of this product as well. It's not a product we own, but it's their product we happen to use, and we're still subject to all kinds of ads and traps for subscriptions etc.
Tricking the customer into an exploitative subscription is more profitable than earning loyalty by providing good value.
And it requires less work to boot!
I'm on holiday at the moment so reopened the app to transfer photos from my camera directly to my phone again after a while of not using it (at home I just use the microsd card readers in my computers). Anyway, I discovered Canon now has a mandatory account requirement. There wasn't even an account option when I bought the camera. Luckily the old apk from APK mirror still works on my phone.
You'll want to keep a copy archived for reverse engineering if/when Google decides to prevent these "loopholes".
At first I was think of the people who signed an agreement for their solar roof (which was entangled with solar credits, etc)
nowadays selling your tesla involves the new owner identifying themselves and uploading their identity documents to tesla.
> nowadays selling your tesla involves the new owner identifying themselves and uploading their identity documents to tesla.
wait does this mean you cannot buy a used tesla anonymously (to tesla), not the reseller (?)
If so, that's crazy
A $100 scale isn't really that captive, especially if continuing to use it costs that much per year. There's no shortage of scales for tracking weight loss and the Apple health integration in my Withings is pretty useless from experience.
Yes, it's not as captivating as a $1,200 iPhone or $4,000 MacBook Pro. But we're talking about habits, and gradual changes and engagements.
However, once you're within a system, and used to interacting with it on a daily basis, you would lean towards their slight nudges and pushes, and over time subscribe to a $2/month service, or their "new solutions" etc.
Not to forget their continued advertisements in the app, and constant pushes. You're no longer a customer that purchases a product, but instead a captive audience that is constantly being engaged and steered towards one thing or another.
I have a $100 Garmin scale as well as a watch [1] and some similar devices and it seems like a good value to me but many people I know say "gee, that's expensive!"
I am really impressed with my Apple hardware but the services strike me as uniformly shoddy and dare I say a lifestyle brand that seduces people into treating garbage as if was gold. Ok, I like what they did with Foundation, I really do, but I think Apple Health, Apple Home and all of those things are for suckers and Withings probably thinks so too. For all I know Apple is charging them an arm and a leg to participate. On the other hand, Garmin Connect takes my active lifestyle seriously.
[1] with 100% satisfaction after discovering third party charging cables!
I like my Apple watch but Apple health app is pretty bad. It's just noisy and complicated. Withing's chart's in the app was good enough.
I'd probably prefer a second more fitness dedicated watch otherwise so that data integration was better.
Well I am a Garmin enthusiast and I often get them refurbished at a good discount
https://www.gpsnation.com/collections/garmin-refurbished?pag...
The official charging cable is atrociously unreliable, enough that I almost gave up on the brand, but there are numerous third party charging attachments like
https://www.amazon.com/RUXELY-Charging-Forerunner-Approach-V...
https://www.amazon.com/Itramax-Charging-Converter-Forerunner...
from Chinese brands with weird names that work perfectly.
I'm a cheapskate so I'd probably make a shortcut so I can say "siri, log my weight at 165 lbs" and have that put my weight into apple health or a spreadsheet. It's a bit more friction, but if the data is useful that's what I'd do. If I find that I'm not using the shortcut, then the data probably isn't useful.
You don’t even need a shortcut: “hey dingus, log a weight of 156.3” and it gets logged to HealthKit. Just did it minutes ago (because I long ago gave up on getting that Withings scale to do the same).
> file a complaint with your OAG
Honestly one of my new favourite uses for AI. Little things I wouldn't ordinarily complain about I can now engage the regulatory state on. (Currently pursuing LG under Wyoming's wiretapping statute.)
Though heading that off might be why this is only "starting from October 13th, 2026" and in respect of "any new Withings account."
I agree, that's a great use for AI.
As for the timing... If you BOUGHT the product before October 13th and simply didn't activate an account yet - then it might still be worthy of a complaint. I'm not saying they are actively false advertising, I haven't checked every one of their store fronts after all. But it is a valid path for someone who did get swindled.
> Honestly one of my new favourite uses for AI. Little things I wouldn't ordinarily complain about I can now engage the regulatory state on.
And public service is getting swamped with petty little BS in return. Even if the substance has merits (and most doesn't, because AI systems are yes-men that don't push back like an actually trained lawyer would), they have to spend sooooo much time reading and digesting all the AI written fluff plus checking if stuff like cited court cases actually exists.
It's ok, they can use AI.
Then perhaps they know the true scale of consumer complaints once friction to file is removed, they can take better actions to reduce those complaints.
> they can take better actions to reduce those complaints
Nine out of ten times companies settle because (a) the claims have merit and (b) it costs them more to go in front of a regulator than it does a consumer.
Can I do the same for like EcoBee?
I bought them a year ago and today they showed me an ad ON MY THERMOSTAT.
If you bought from a big-box retailer and you’re considering ditching ecobee because of this, you should try to return them. Even if you’re outside the return policy, if you’re pleasant to the customer service staff they might be able to help you.
Amazon reviews are essentially meaningless at this point, the important un-fakeable stat is return rates. Brands care, and retailers track it and will drop products with high return rates.
> #3 - If you haven't reviewed the product on Amazon, you should warn other users with a review
I've warned users of many such instances of false claims, and safety issues with products. As a consequence, I've been banned from reviewing, and all my past reviews have been removed.
"Community standards", I guess.
I've stopped trusting reviews altogether. They're to easily gamed - dishonest competition and clients posts fakes. Dishonest businesses dispute all negative reviews(and most disappointed customers don't have the time to fight it).
Reviews just don't work when the user pool goes below a certain "average honesty level"
amazon famously let you swap products of an id/ad/product without loosing the reviews so you can even find literal unrelated reviews under such fake product amazon listing pages
Also trustpilot:
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.withings.com
I had a similar experience with tado that tried to paywall a basic temperature control of a smart thermostat. Their ratings got trashed and they pulled back.
Why do they even bother? This is going to hit the front page of every health/fitness/cycling/running blog site, there will be a big stink for a few weeks, then Withings will quietly (or loudly, "we've heard you!", as if they were listening in the first place) get rid of it. And they'll waste all this time, money, and customer goodwill for nothing, because no one could have possibly seen this backlash coming.
Doesn't matter to me, neither their POS blood pressure cuff nor their scale will sync to HealthKit anyway (oh, how I've tried), I'm not losing anything. So stomping my feet with "I'm never buying another Withings product!" won't make any difference, I was not going to buy their POS products again anyway. :-)
I used to have issues with my Withings scale not syncing to HealthKit, but I just checked and it had all of my weightings in there just fine. Can't even remember the last time I checked the Withings app.
Will they get rid of it? It seems more likely that they'll do damage control to wait out the news cycle (the official comment on the linked post is an excellent example of corporate deflection) and change nothing.
This change sucks (but as a long time Withings user doesn't affect me... for now), but I haven't had trouble with either the scale or BP cuff syncing to Apple Health. I don't have any suggestions besides double-checking the Withings app has permissions to write to HealthKit. I don't see any settings in the Withings app itself besides a prompt to check "Settings > Privacy > Health > Withings App".
Sorry if this isn't helpful.
Aside: all BP cuffs and their apps sorta seem to suck when it comes to sync. I also have an Omron. At least mine measure accurately. Make sure to validate yours with your GP.
... the process of validating the accuracy of my home BP monitor reminded me of the Physics 510 lab I did in graduate school!
Omrons do their primary job well but you run into the "IT is where great brands go to die" phenomenon that you run into everywhere -- like the stay I had at a Hilton where the staff was great but between bad wiring and bad React apps the IT experience was shoddy... Staff would be held accountable if they did a bad job but problems with IT are treated like the weather, something nobody can do anything about.
I do appreciate your feedback, thanks. I just don’t worry about it anymore because I can just as easily say, “hey dingus, record a body weight/blood pressure reading of…”. I wish I’d figured that out after wasting time to get synch to work. :-)
Because people will pay; that's why.
Will they though? I can get a brand new scale for less than $99 that has apple health integration.
Maybe some brands can command a $99 annual fee, but has withings got some loyal fan base? Seems unlikely for a third-tier fitness gadget company.
Will enough people pay, is the question. Yes, they’ll lose some sales. But if they make it up in subscription fees they won’t care.
> Why do they even bother?
It's what they were taught in business school.
Not at a good one.
Are there good business schools?
Okay, mean, but I’ve done consulting at a Big 3 and the MBA kids are bananas. They’re incredibly hard-working but have the ethics of a second-hand Kallax that’s too wobbly to stand.
they work great, who needs healthkit? been using them for 10 years without it.
If all you want is the one mesasurenr, no reason to use HealthKit.
If you want to graph resting heart rate against steps per week over a year or two, that’s when HealthKit adds value. Or if your blood pressure cuff and scale are different brands and you want to see combined data.
yeah, I guess I have the stuff from their ecosystem watch, cuff and the scale, so I get that in the (free) app.
Because the expected lifetime value of the $40 scale sold just shot up to well over $200. If 50% of customers stop buying the $40 scales and the other half start paying $99 annually, this is an absolutely no-brainer from a revenue perspective
Apology ads are the bees knees these days, so that checks out.
I dropped my Withings stuff after constantly dealing with inconsistent syncing behavior. I got a body fat percentage weight scale and a blood pressure cuff from essentially no-name brands on Amazon, and both sync instantly every time. The blood pressure cuff doesn't even require me to have the app open on my phone.
Tough to beat compared to Withings' system, which seemed to rely on everything going to the cloud, then going back to your phone, THEN Apple Health, if you're lucky. With each of those steps being on whatever interval it decides.
My Body+ syncs quite well now, after they fixed whatever hiccup it had with losing Wi-Fi credentials.
That said, more than once it has synced the entire family’s account to MY Apple Health data, which is infuriating.
I was considering their Scanwatch 2, but I dunno… After returning the sleep sensor and the occasional hiccup with the Body+, I think Withings has lost my business.
Shame, can’t just keep their products working without getting into all sorts of AI and subscription shenanigans.
>his is going to hit the front page of every health/fitness/cycling/running blog site
No one serious uses them for anything, bodyweight can be measured using any cheap scale
Bodyfat%, withings is very unreliable for this.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines
4.10:
You may not monetize built-in capabilities provided by the hardware or operating system, such as Push Notifications, the camera, or the gyroscope; or Apple services and technologies, such as Apple Music access, iCloud storage, or Screen Time APIs.
Nordictrack does this with iFit as well. Can’t sync to Apple Health without a paid account. Syncing is somewhat janky too.
I've always felt that YouTube is also breaking this rule by making background playback a Premium feature.
Know why you've always felt that way?
Because YouTube is breaking that rule by monetizing background operation.
I'm not seeing how that would be a violation. Youtube has never been a "download files to my device" service. It has always been a "stream video from our servers" service. I don't see how the fact that they added the ability to save a file and gated it by a subscription would be a violation.
Can you explain how you see it as one?
This isn’t about downloading videos for offline use but about background playback.
YouTube recently blocked the ability to play a video in the background (or with the screen turned off) unless you pay for premium. It just turns off the video if you leave the app, unlike other media on my iPhone.
AFAIK you can open the video in Firefox, which allows you to stream in the background. of course not that seamless, but at least there's still a work-around.
Orion browser on iOS supports this very seamlessly, both pip and background.
I haven’t been able to do background play in YouTube without Premium for at least 4 years. I also recall finding Reddit threads of people having the same issue.
So… not exactly new for iPhone users.
Just because someone broke the rule in the past, persisted in breaking the rule and is still breaking the rule today doesn't mean they get a free pass to break the rule.
> "download files to my device"
> they added the ability to save a file
Since when?
Oh, you mean pre-caching it and allowing the cache to play off-line?
It is not "downloading" or "saving" a file if I don't get an actual file on my file system I can use. I hate the abuse of this term.
Did you know that it's technically against the Apple TOS to use push notifications for advertising without allowing end users to opt out of the advertising part without removing functionality, even though it's never enforced and massive companies do it all the time?
Even Apple themselves do it, I see apple send me push notifications that are ads for Apple Arcade all the time.
But they are monetizing the export button you press before the api call is made.
The fee is to unlock something on their own back end, triggered by using a non Apple device. So Apple’s license probably doesn’t apply (the corner case that could cause it to apply is the app generating a key and sending it to the Withings infrastructure, I suppose).
This only applies if the sole reason of the purchase is to gate an apple capability. If the purchase does more than that, literally anything, you can gate all the apple parts on an iPhone.
Where does it say that in the guidelines?
They don't restrict the App on the Phone to access Apple Health, just the synch between their Cloud and Apple.
Developers can only write data into Apple Health from the local phone SDK.
Cloud import is only supported from health providers and laboratories.
Fun story: when I got my Withings watch 5-6 years ago couldn't get it Bluetooth paired with my phone. Contacted support.
Me: hey bluetooth pairing isn't working I've tried A, B, C and here's additional context. Withings support: [over 24 hours later] Have you tried A? :) Me: ...Yes? Withings support: [over 24 hours later] Have you tried B? :) Me: As I said initially, yes. Can you please batch things to try to expedite this since replies are so slow? Withings support: [over 24 hours later] We have to do this in order. :) Have you tried having a different phone even though your phone meets our listed requirements? :) Me: ..................... Me: I debugged it myself in Android dev mode and got it working, I had to do X, perhaps you can relay the issue to your engineers. Thanks for nothing. Withings support: [over 24 hours later] oh
And as a bonus after an update a couple years ago it looses track of time within a couple weeks and has to be manually set.
Very pretty product once upon a time with horrid customer service and software.
What was the fix?
(24 hours later...)
I can’t wait till somebody figures out how to reverse engineer these with a LLM so we can just sync the scale data ourselves. I purchased one of these devices, but I am somewhat regretting my decision now.
I'm coming to the conclusion that my life is improved the more I can leave these technologies alone.
This is the unfortunate truth. I've gone through 2 Withings scales because the battery basically had planned obsolecense. Then I bought a Quardio smart scale, but the company went bankrupt and all cloud syncing went down. Meanwhile my mom's $20 dumb scale works perfectly fine.
These days it's not true that if you pay for the item, you're the customer. Now you're just a potential revenue stream.
Do the newer ones have rechargeable batteries? I thought even my new one used AAA's. I have one from 2012 that's still kicking. Aside from this rugpull I've been very happy with Withings.
Used to be a thing before LLMs too.
Here is a starting point. It includes a link to instructions on how to reverse engineer a Bluetooth scale[0], and it looks like someone dumped some data already.
[0] https://github.com/oliexdev/openScale/issues/786
True but it's good to see access to our own devices democratized, for once.
It isn't far short of magical to watch Opus hack a piece of connected hardware. Everybody should try to take advantage of that capability at least once, if only to see it in action before they nerf it.
I've had pretty good luck using Google Appscript to either access web APIs or screenscrape, then parse into a Google Sheet (which I either use as-is or as the source to populate a web app).
Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058850 - October 2026
https://github.com/morluto/rea
https://rea.tools
I'm not as optimistic. I think we're in a very small golden window and once companies catch on that reverse engineering is taking off in a big way, they're going to panic and start demanding cryptographically-sealed binaries with remote attestation everywhere. And they'll probably get it, because what the consumer wants barely matters anymore.
Something something think of the children.
Except it'll all be locked down into a lower-bidder insecure state too.
I also think it will be a short window. I can already imagine the convoluted encryption algorithms and weird stuff the big companies will put in place to stop us from cracking their software and so on, but at least in the meantime, and with legacy devices, there will be fun to be had...
Convoluted encryption algorithms are something the games industry has been playing at forever and they haven’t made something uncrackable yet.
Even on mobile?
Cracked APKs are a thing that have a large market.
We need an open firmware for these scales.
I just need a scale that syncs with my phone, and none of those subscriptions.
I can't help but feel that something soon gonna break, and break big. Like, the decompilation stuff either gonna get criminalized, or forbidden in training, or I don't know. Current state of affairs became super imbalanced, where I can decompile 400k+ lines big game in a weekend and rip it's engine; or, as pointed in sister thread, as someone cloned music processor device in 2 hours.
The question is who and when first blinks.
I’m surprised it’s not already forbidden in training. They won’t even mention brands or characters because that’s wrongthink.
I'm also surprised when reading stuff here like "agent harness app %X% is a new moat!". I mean, I can point even GPT itself on their own new app and it happily obliges in dumping all features, writing product doc or disassembling itself.
Not that I want it -- my tokens are not free -- but it's here. Up for grabs.
What AI are you using? Image generators are kinda like this but AFAIK no LLMs do this. Maybe a little or warning about copyright at most for specific use cases.
got a link to that comment in the sister thread?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104955
Local AI will be made illegal under the guise of security, and then they'll just purge anything "revolutionary" from services. The endgame currently getting pushed by the big players is pretty obvious.
It'll be made illegal in the same way piracy is. Major platforms won't be able to host it but anyone who wants it will trivially be able to torrent the latest model and do whatever they want.
Other countries won't care and let people reverse engineer away.
Yeah, some additional friction. For the curious but not for the masses..
> It'll be made illegal in the same way piracy is.
but you dont need a $10k piece of hardware to do piracy.
They'll make high bandwidth/memory devices something that is more difficult to acquire (e.g., you have to license it and be subject to auditing).
> Local AI will be made illegal under the guise of security
Molon labe
And the big players will run out of money. Win-win, I guess.
Luckily we have open weights models that can't be banned. Even if you tried, it would be impossible to enforce, like Napster/Bittorrent again.
We've been having an existential crisis in the SaaS industry for at least six months now. See stock prices and internal panic. The recent recreation of the Adobe suite (the hard way, not a decompile) is the nail in the coffin. A company worth $98B just had its most valuable software copied by one guy with a laptop. Software patents have always been difficult or impossible to secure and defend, all over the world. So there is little legal protection.
On the one hand, everyone gets all the software they could ever want now. That's cool. On the other hand, the entire profession and industry is soon worthless. That's a lot of lost jobs and companies. We are not ready for this level of change this fast.
Have you looked at the issues page on Github? Looooooooong way to any recreation, and I doubt anyone is even wanting to walk that way. It was all for hype, and hype it got.
Bugs yes, but it's also free. Most features are strikingly close to the official suite. Again, this was done by one guy with a laptop. If more people participated, or he spent more time and effort on this, and/or the LLMs get even better (which they are), most of those bugs would also be gone. This is a proof of concept which proved the concept.
I think it's also worth touching on the concept of good enough. Most studios have been building software which is FAR past good enough. Most people use a few features in any given app and rarely venture outside of that. Most people never experience any of the recorded bugs. They're just trucking along. I think this Adobe suite clone is good enough for most people.
There are other free and not that buggy alternatives. Features mean nothing it cannot export the result right. It is not a proof of concept, it is a dancing bear - yes, it if fun to see a bear dance, but it dances terribly still. The money spent on tokens to make it useable would buy you lifetime Adobe subscription...
It’s a 30-day-old vibe-coded project and pretty damn close to the original.
Do you expect future attempts to be worse or better?
Yes there are alternatives, but people resist change when they need to learn new workflows.
Remember it needs to get criminalised everywhere for it to stop happening.
I think I’m going to have a crack at with with Claude and REA this weekend, if nothing else comes up.
Pretty sure it's already possible. I have a small service running on homelab that syncs all the withings data to garmin. Has needed no attention in years and just works.
I give it at most a week. People freed the Whoop pretty quickly. I mean, you could probably do it yourself if you have the time and an LLM, it's probably not that locked down.
Maybe LLMs are going to help free us from enshittification. For now.
I don't have the scale, but I got the protocol for the watch and it'll probably be similar enough.
Been using my implementation exclusively for months, seems fine.
https://github.com/davidventura/withouthings
Nice work. Have you seen GadgetBridge? https://gadgetbridge.org/
This came up on HN about a month ago: https://didac.dev/blog/i-made-my-withings-scale-sync-to-home...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49550436
I already did, the scales local sync with bluetooth is at https://github.com/NavistAuLabs/esphome-withings-wpp
It would take a few hours with Claude probably. Someone just has to care enough to spend the tokens.
I was actually in the market for a scale to replace my Wyze (still works, but the app is just not very reliable) and was strongly considering a Withings Body Smart.
With Withings firmly off the list, what's the best alternative for something that's accurate and reliably syncs with Apple Health?
I want to know this too!
I have the Tanita RD-545 it's great
I've had (what I think is) the Renpho Elis 1 for years and have been happy with it. Was like $20-25 from Amazon I think in 2018 and still works fine
Same here - £17 in the UK three years ago and it's been... fine.
It takes normal AA batteries (which I've had to replace only once), the results tally up with the properly-calibrated scale at my gym, and the app doesn't have any particular annoyances. I'm on Android and it syncs fine with Google services, but it claims to do Apple Health too.
Honestly, it's one of the better pieces of tech I've bought in the past few years, and I don't see how a fancier / more expensive brand could be noticeably better.
Psst…https://github.com/saagarjha/Unwyze
/s Official comments from Withings
Hello everyone, we discovered a new revenue stream:
Starting from October 17th, 2026 every comment on this thread will cost you 50 cents, and every like - 10 cents.
OR you can subscribe to Withings+ and get these features for free
Can't wait for the following HN post:
> Withering, an open source Withings app written in Rust.
I guess this will lead to more companies relying on strong crypto to maintain control over their devices rather than relying on the amount of work required to reverse engineering them.
https://gadgetbridge.org/gadgets/wearables/withings/
I am using it for my Amazfit Bip
https://github.com/ryanbr/noop Not rust :(
You forgot Jev. Or is that fad already over?
This is up there with BMW charging a subscription for heated seats.
I don't see the appeal of heated seats, I've never turned the ones in my cars on. OK, I suppose when you've left your car in below zero weather it's useful.
Heated steering wheel on the other hand; that's heavenly.
I suppose if I ever find a BMW attractive enough to buy one despite this consumer-hating behavior (their grilles help me stay away), I'd figure out if I can unplug the seat from the control unit, and just plug it straight to a different power supply to get the heat. Or will they use something like HDMI's Digital Content Protection to prevent "heat piracy"?
Anyway it's all theoretical, it seems they've given up trying to pick your pocket for heated seats, but for other features they're still going to mug you: https://www.drive.com.au/news/bmw-admits-heated-seat-subscri...
I see you did not grow up going out to the driveway to start the car before breakfast :)
Grew up in a warm place. Currently my car sleeps in a relatively warm underground carpark of the apartment block.
We had to plug our (gas) car in at night. I don’t recommend it.
Yeah, we could tell from your original comment
It's like designed by Apple in California. Hard to understand winters then :)
Picking on Apple because I've had my phone shut down when i left it on the dashboard inside my stopped car.
If you do not have a garage and live in a cold weather climate they are fantastic. Heat up almost instantly when the engine might not warm up entirely to get the heat going for a good 15 min.
> when you've left your car in below zero weather it's useful
Yup. Getting back from any snow sport where you wiped out and all the snow decided your butt's where it's going to hang out sells the product.
> Heated steering wheel on the other hand; that's heavenly
Twice I tried it on rental cars it freaked the hell out of me. This is what I'd imagine people experiencing some exotic neurological collapse feel like - part of hands feeling warm, while surrounding bits feeling frozen. Mixed signaling, really bizarre dissonance. So now when I get a new car, I get pretty much every option except for the heated steering wheel.
It's funny, I have heated steering wheel in my car (2022 Leaf), and when I bought it I didn't think anything of it. However, being in Scandinavia, when the first snow+ice came, I tried it and loved it instantly. Now I even use it on not very cold days, just because it feels nice. :)
I have some sorta skin condition that I can not stand either the heated seats and the heated steering wheel.
But my wife ... in winters, the first thing on entering the car is to activate the heatings seats. Some people like them. And yes I paid for the subscription (or a package that cost me a bunch but gave me everything all inclusive).
Turn it on on the passenger seat to keep your take out food warm while you drive home.
Also good for those of us with back issues. I use mine even in the summer sometimes for that reason.
it's quite useful in a convertible along with the heated steering and the neck warmer taking it roof down on a coldish day
They are nice in cold weather to "hold you over" on short drives before the air heating warms the car up.
My Civic remote start with the key fob will automatically turn them on when it's cold.
You can buy the feature outright when you order the car.
This is just them figuring out that if they pre-install the HW in every car they get enough payments to cover the units never used.
It has two obvious consumer benefits: second hand sales (the new owner may really want it), and very occasional use.
I don't think either of those are consumer benefits at all. And the hardware was charged for when the car was initially sold - it was part of the total unit cost of creation. The subscription was a consumer hostile way of increasing spend with the brand. The genius' at BMW looked at Tesla's Plaid mode and FSD and thought they could replicate that model but failed to realise that people don't view their brands the same way - people treat a Tesla like a software purchase, but a BMW like an expensive toaster.
I think you misunderstand - they can charge slightly less for the car, and not actually charge you for that bit of hardware, if they're monetizing it differently.
This constant appeasing of investors makes me really sad so here’s a message for the Withings PR team, I know you guys are reading this. I will never in a million years, not when hell freezes over, pay 100 dollars to you. I use the synching now, it’s nice, but you’re really over evaluating how I would not be able to just write a 3 digit number directly in apple health. It takes 10 seconds. If I am enoyed enough, I’ll just hack it and bypass your app completely. I.OWN.THE.DEVICE.
I have a Withings sleep sensor. They recently sent me a marketing mail, based on my previous night’s sleep, with a pitch to improve my sleep through a paid program. I had already opted out of marketing emails so their unsubscribe link had nothing to unsubscribe from.
Is anyone doing scales, sleep sensors, and BP cuffs that don’t use the cloud at all?
If you have an Android phone you can use Gadgetbridge which is an alternative app to sync your smart devices. It keeps all data on your phone. They support lots of devices, I use it with my Garmin smartwatch and I'm a happy user.
Haven't tried it yet but there's OpenMuse for the Athena S Muse headband.
I think there's an open source Whoop firmware now for that.
Likewise, Apple does not give Withings access to Apple Health's data, even with user permission.
So, I can understand why Withings does not want to be the one doing the hard work of data collection, while Apple is preparing its own subscription for Health services.
> Apple does not give Withings access to Apple Health's data
What do you mean? My Withings app can access that data without issues
The “hard work of data collection”, it’s a fucking scale and it’s MY data, I paid for the hardware, it’s not Withings data at all. They knew the deal going in, Apple didn’t change the terms.
I’ve been a withings customer for just shy of 15 years. My original scale from 2012 is still kicking and I bought an upgraded one 2 years ago.
I will never pay Withings another dime if they keep up this bullshit and/or look for a way to hack the scale to have it talk to some self-hosted backend/app that does sync to Apple Health.
> Likewise, Apple does not give Withings access to Apple Health's data, even with user permission
Yes it does. It's controlled in Apple Health under Sharing
no one at whitings is working hard on taking any measurements, just some mba convinced themselves that they do actual work
device was bought by customer and it's all customer's data
Surely, the user is doing all the hard work. The scale or whatever is just a tool to do so - like a ruler. Imagine if your measuring tape put the measurements you take behind a paywall.
And that will be the end of me buying anything more from Withings. Good job guys, I was happy enough with the scale, but I do not pay yet another subscription just to get the readings put into Apple Health. Bye.
I run a (web and native) app that integrates with Apple calendar and the like with per-user feed configuration. Due to the way Apple polls my servers, I am essentially hit with rolling 5 minute requests for every individual (non-negligibly sized) feed. The amount of bandwidth used at scale is not something I can just look at and shrug, and there are plenty of ways it could probably be made more efficient with levels of caching on near vs long-term items. I have to pass that cost on to my customer somehow. I wonder if this is something like that but at grander scale. There’s a lot of HIPAA compliance involved as well. Granted, I’m not charging a line item for that feature like they are here. I just roll it into the cost of the subscription and everyone shrugs because the price is justifiable to them.
Their software and hardware is of such low quality anyway, I will never buy another Withings product again. After using their scale and their thermometer, it's obvious they invest very little in quality control.
It's sad - I have an old Nokia branded scale and it's honestly still working great. The app itself got bloated and has performance issues - and became less useful.
I had a Withings watch and absolutely loved it. I considered buying another one after my old one got water damage. However, it was becoming evident from changes to the app that it was getting more and more locked down and ultimately was going to require a subscription for anything useful. At the same time, the app was getting buggier. At one point I lost multi years worth of data when I had to re-sync my watch to a new phone.
It's a shame because I liked their spin on a hybrid smart watch which looked like a traditional analog watch. Garmin does make hybrids, but to me they all look too sporty or tactical.
Sounds like some PM is jealous of Whoop and trying to launder the cost and boost adoption of their unwanted AI feature/subscription behind a heavily used existing feature.
I’m grandfathered-in (account created in 2013 or something like that) but I voted their app down to one star on the Apple App Store and stated they’re committing highway robbery.
And this is why we buy apple products. Imagine buying a third party slopwatch and then being told you have to pay $99 to read your own data.
Reminds me of Chamberlain and their garage door openers...
Apple is adding ads to their services, and it looks like they're going to force Siri AI onto every recent-enough device they have. Don't get comfortable.
Not relevant to the discussion at hand, but sure.
Reclaim your disk space: https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI/
Apple is an interesting example to choose, they have some of the worst "vendor lock in" practices of any company.
Green text bubbles, "[Person] reacted to this message", and mandatory $150 monitor stands come to mind.
mediatory monitor stand... right
It was a thing. Apparently it was actually $1000 though lol:
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-monitor-stand-price-re...
That's a shame, because the Withings Scanwatch 2 was of great help for us when a family member was waiting for heart surgery after a pulmonary edema. Having the watch reassure her every day was a big boost to morale. Thankfully, we did not have to test this, but it may also have been very useful had it picked a problem.
I have their sleep tracker, and one of the more annoying features is that you must open the app on your phone for it to sync sleep data to Apple Health. This is exactly the opposite of the convenience I had in mind when I bought the thing.
To Withings defense: At least to my experience they have the most open API going on: https://developer.withings.com/
Other players in the field like Garmin are super restricted.
For my own use case i swapped to Health Connect (Android) though. Whatever might happen with that.
Of course i am also appalled about this change and also the pretty much non-response from the customer service in the forum about this, no good arguments have been mentioned.
But there’s no need for the API at all. Scale to phone over BT then to Apple Health on the device. It’s the API that should be the add-on.
In some cases, sensor data requires further transformation/processing. If you do it in the app, others who decompile your app can copy the implementation; if you put it behind an API, it makes it much harder.
It’s a weight and a date/time stamp. There’s zero need for cloud processing.
Smart scales use BIA tech to figure out your bodyfat%, i think that's what most people use withings for, otherwise there are plenty of scales which can log your weight.
Even thought withings is garbage for bodyfat% estimation but plenty of noobs do not understand this.
Something that's getting particularly irritating is having to login to an app for functionality that should be between my phone and a Bluetooth device.
Sadly the better experience is at odds with most business models these days...
The Withings app has just got consistently worse and worse over the last few years. I just wanted some scales that would sync to my phone and record my weight over time.
Now the app is absolutely bloated and I can barely find my weight, and the syncing has become _much_ less stable, and the app is constantly asking me to sign in again.
Amazing how they were from good, to bad, to terrible.
Noticed this in the Withings app too. Sadly I've seen this trend with a lot of apps. For example 98% of the time I open the Audible app I want to play an audiobook, but they make you click multiple times. They want you to buy books, not listen to them.
There's also the the part where you had to opt in to unrestricted data collection to use the app. The app won't geocode data from the watch unless you set it to allow location tracking at all times, even when not using the app.
Got the Scanwatch on an employer discount deal with Withings, still wasted $180.
I will bet that $99 they can’t make it stick. 1990s business practices in an age of reverse-engineering LLMs
That's a popular take now, but is there any project of that kind that really got traction and use? (I am not talking about all-hype-no-substance like the Adobe one).
I had the Withings sleep monitor – it never managed to sync with Apple Health anyway.
Looking at the support forums many others had issues with their then new app replacing a working one.
So I don't think this will have much effect as it didn't work anyway.
So is this next on the AI assisted firmware/hardware reverse engineering block? Or has someone already gotten to it?
What a time to be alive.
oh wow, I was literally thinking about buying whitings device, now I don't have think about it anymore - I'll definitely never buy from them
supposedly someone is getting bonus for loosing customers, that's how it works?
Well, crap. I really like Withings's scales. They're very nice and the results closely match medical equipment readings I've had, so in my experience they've been great for keeping track of things between checkups. Their privacy policy is (or at least was) one of the only ones I'd trust with medical data. The iOS app started to get annoying with its extra subscription features, which I couldn't care less about because I get them through other means.
But subscribing so that the scale in my bathroom, which syncs to the app in my phone, can sync to another app on that same phone? LOL, hell no. That simply will not happen. And even though it only applies to new users now, if there's not enough pushback that it loses them more business than it gains them, my official prediction is that within a year it'll cover new accounts, or new devices added to existing accounts.
Scanwatch owner here.
I’ve had this for, I think, two or three years now and really liked the hardware in both aesthetics and battery life. Bought it after abandoning Fitbit when they became part of Google.
The software has become noticeable worse recently, and this is the last straw where I will actively recommend _against_ buying them. The brands doing enshitification has to stop and Withings is now one of them.
Back in 2016, an update bricked my Withings scale. I don't think I've considered them again since.
I got their blood pressure cuff for a couple years ago. I declined the setup and BT sync, partly from privacy, partly from apathy of "when will it break".
The cuff works well, I enter the numbers manually, no failures so far.
It's a pity. I still use my 12 year old Withings scale, and it works like a charm. Also have been using the Withings watch and Withings blood pressure monitor. Withings builds long lasting products that just work.
However, even if the sync for me as existing customer still works, I don't support paywalling basic functionality. Thus, for my future purchases I will choose a different brand. That's imho the only language companies understand: Lost revenue.
It was nice as long as it lasted.
What’s withings?
Dunno man, I just hop on the treadmill, do the thing for an hour, and hop off. Every day. I don’t need to count every single second or calorie I spend on it. Why all this paraphernalia around it all is needed is beyond me.
Best thing about minimalism is realising you don’t need mental load junk.
But how do you know when to stand?
You don’t stand on a treadmill. Ever. That’s how I know.
I love how the Apple Watch patronizingly congratulates me for standing in the morning. Can’t wait til the battery dies and I can get a Swatch.
Good news you don’t have to wait. Sell the thing.
Or you could just, you know, turn that off.
Perfect reminder to point REV & co at my Withings scale.
Reverse engineer it using AI.
Reverse engineering doesn't help for iOS very much since even if you build your own version of their app with that feature unlocked, iOS doesn't allow you to sideload.
You'd have to pay $100/year for an apple developer account and then refresh the app every 14 days (since publishing your own hacked version on the appstore would plainly be a copyright and trademark violation, and if you use a developer account to load a developer version of an app on your device, you have to constantly refresh it).
Switch to one of the linux phones if you actually want to install software on your device.
Yes, the solution to that problem is not using anti-user ecosystems, like anything apple ships.
What's the point of that, when the body fat % measurement is highly inaccurate on these?
reverse engineering to get the garbage out from sensors/.
Me and my partner bought Withings watches - neither of us will buy them again. Very very poor customer service
I think this is the perfect time to start closing down platforms and enshittifying things.
Been a good time for a while. Too many scandals, too much to look after, too many economical problems.
When people don't even have the mental strength to give blowback, google blocks and constraints android, new mandatory subscriptions come up.
What are you going to do, boycott and switch brands and buy another pc? with these prices?
And thus I reiterate my product request for health devices that can write straight to Apple Health without needing their own stupid app and account like Withings, or at the very least whose apps are little more than temporary data aggregators and writers to Apple Health that don’t require accounts or personal data.
Hm. I wonder if I can use a RPi Zero to read the console output of a medical scale and write it to Apple Health for my profile…
I do not care for Withings software or subscriptions, but their hardware is so nice.
AH, you clearly haven't had the "5 different chargers breaking and begging support to send a different production batch". (And paying for every charger.)
My scanwatch is beautiful, and the battery life is great. But to this day, on my 5th charger, it either charges to full in 20m, or 3 hours. Same charger, same wall outlet. Probably not great for the watches hardware.
Unfortunately I've had. I've had two different scanwatch models and ended up buying ~3 chargers each for of them. Just thinking abut USB-C and how much less different chargers types I have makes me really happy.
Has anyone vibe-coded a reverse engineered clone app yet? Should be doable today.
I was gonna say, I’d be shocked if it already wasn’t from the home assistant community.
For Android+watch, yes, scale likely compatible with some small amount of work
https://github.com/davidventura/withouthings
I wish ios would allow sideloading because the current model makes this stuff not viable. Few people are going to pay $100/year to host a free reverse engineered app.
I already do this and I’ll host someone else’s app if they ask
Assuming the Withings app is on the same phone as the HealthKit account, there's no "cloud" involved. This is 100% grift. I hope nobody buys these.
Yeah, I got turned off when I realized you can’t sync these devices via Bluetooth or LAN.
Required path is: Scale data -> WiFi -> Internet -> Withings app -> HealthKit
Is that my problem? I figured that WiFi access was enough to hit my phone to update HealthKit, but I never gave the scale access to the Internet ("you can go live over there on the IoT VLAN with the other tattletale devices").
Well, fuck that. Now I'm really, really, really not going to buy a Withings product again.
Mine died after a year, which I suspect is because my spouse used it after showers, and they’re not designed to handle bathroom moisture. Not even rated as water resistant.
Never again.
Who the hell designs a consumer scale that can’t work in a typical bathroom?
In what room did they possibly imagine their device would be used?
There’s an HA integration path for the scale to HA but I don’t believe anyone has yet built the HA to HealthKit side of that.
Doesn’t that require using the Withings API (cloud)?
Looks like HA updated their documentation to reflect the $99/yr requirement: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/withings/
Whoever wrote https://didac.dev/blog/i-made-my-withings-scale-sync-to-home... apparently got it working with Bluetooth LE and an esp32 chip. Sadly, they didn’t share their code yet, and as I lack their social media options I can’t email them requesting they post it. Perhaps they’ll see this comment, or perhaps someone else will repeat the solution and post it this time — but without the HealthKit path, there’s not much gain to be had over just manually typing the weight measured into the Health app.
Looks like the Body+ and WS-30 models have an official “Bluetooth networking mode,” but alas, my model does not.
:(
Seriously? That’s awful by design. I figured it was BT from scale to phone app.
It used to work that way but there was an update that forced it to go through their app and you needed to make an account. I had used mine for a couple years until this became a requirement then I just gave it away and went back to my dumb scale and manually entering the value into the Health app
The V in IOT stands for Value.
The E in IOT stands for Ethics.
The enshitification continues by making everything a subscription. Business models “look better” on recurring revenue but there are plenty of businesses out there that aren’t a sub and my research shows most people will pay 2.5x the yearly price as a once off. Maybe not for what Withings are offering though, since this is clearly extortionate
Alright lads, what scale are we moving on to now?
Wyze makes a decent one, and cheap. Probably has fewer bells and whistles, but it serves me just fine.
I have found the body fat estimator on the Withings mid-tier to be ludicrously off. I’m not convinced these scales offer much more than just the weight number itself, which isn’t very useful after a certain point.
For people looking for alternatives, I highly recommend the Beurer BF 720. It syncs with Bluetooth to the app, which doesn't require you to login. App syncs with Healthkit and that's it. Also works really well with multiple users who connect their own phones. And it's pretty affordable.
Only issue I've experienced is that background sync just stops working sometimes. Then I need to open the app manually to sync.
Withings opened my eyes. I’d been using cheap crappy devices that didn’t do much at all. “Upgraded” to withings and holy crap, the new user experience was a complete tour of my personal health data they wanted to ingest and control. I was finding no way to opt out. I couldn’t use the thing until I answered all the questions. It’s clear they’re all-in on vacuuming up data for their own purposes. I went back to a dumb scale and dumb bp cuff. I’d love to have things that automatically connect and record in my software of choice. But you can see what withings feels that costs them. They want you to pay not even to escape their confines, but just to allow your data to go to your own system. This shit has to end
Withoutgs
“we’d like to offer some clarity and reassurance about what is changing and who is affected. [restatement of the issue raised by OP]”
I'm not sure if these companies realize cough AI can quickly create alternatives.
I own a couple of Withings devices (a scale, and a blood pressure monitor) and this doesn’t affect me (for now!) as an existing user, but it still infuriates me. Saving my data in Apple Health is the *primary* reason I bought those devices.
Relatedly, I switched blood glucose monitor brands because my first device (Libre) did not sync to Apple Health: the data was locked in the device app where it was functionally useless to me and my doctor. So I switched to a more expensive brand (Dexcom G7) just so I could keep a complete history in Apple Health. If they ever remove or paywall that integration I will switch again.
I've had a scanwatch from withings for a few years and I've toyed with the idea of adding it to gadgetbridge. I think it might be time. I sense this will be quite a fast project with AI
Hopefully AI-driven reverse engineering will help end some of this enshittification.
Someone build a new Apple Withings client or api-bridge.
Bruh, thanks god I bought mine 2 years ago. But won't by a new scale from them then.
Worst product i've ever owned that I feel completely duped on.
It's a hard feeling to explain, when purchasing any "high cost" tech device, I like to think i'm a smart consumer and do my research.
Nope. This company is, for back of a better word, disgusting. Never in my life have I had to maintain a profesional relationship with support agents for sake of: -charger breaking repeatedly -Syncing breaking repeatedlty -BIometrics are completely, completely random and arbitrary compared to other professional devices. -time desync -Completely, baffling missing integrations. (I can't configure a god damn alarm?) -The big one, dynamic paywalling. Since I purchased mine, I have been locked out of the few worthwhile features that the app/device initially offered.
The scanwatch 2 is completely useless as a watch and a health device. It is marginally acceptable as a fashion device.
For those who want to have a bottom line impact and have time & money to spare, purchase a scale or a blood pressure monitor from Apple Store online, try to set it up on your phone until you hit the new paywall, and then call and arrange to return it; when asked, explain that it requires a $100/year subscription for Apple HealthKit support and that you’re offended at Apple for omitting that. It’s quite possible that Withings made this change without notifying Apple, and a handful of such returns could lead Apple to pull all Withings products from their sales channels in response. Or it could just be wasted time, and Apple’s fine with it, but there’s no easier way to find out — and this sales channel is probably valuable enough to Withings that losing access to it might cost them their entire projected revenue gains from the fee.
The entire economy is a grift now.
This is sort of an old-man-yells-at-clouds comment, but I recently realized that most of the new stuff companies sell is pretty much a solution in search of a problem. Apple's whole announcement this past week was like this, but I'm feeling the same way about smartwatches, smart homes, and the like lately as well.
For most folks, I feel like spending 20 minutes a day on Darebee would be more effective than their $20/month subscription to their $600 smartwatch.
https://darebee.com/
Why does everything on this website have to be a bait-and-switch funnel to some kind of (self-)Promotion.
Not every link is an ad.
Darebee's a non-profit that's been around 15 years, and the founder of it intentionally changed its name to not be her identity because her mission is the fitness of real people.
My observation of people that are spending $600 on a special fitness watch and then a $20 month subscription to sync all of their health data and manage it with colorful graphs is they're not in better shape than the people that simply work out.
It's seems like the fitness equivalent of productivity porn.
Tell me, what part of your workout program you're pitching can inform me how much I weigh? How about my body fat percentage? Can it tell me my heart rate?
Darebee's a fitness nonprofit. I'm not pitching it. I just think it's the straightest line between zero and working out.
You don't have to know how much you weigh and you don't have to know your body fat percentage or even your heart rate to be effective at fitness. You don't need to buy equipment or have a special place to do it.
My point is the barrier to being fit is almost zero if you don't get distracted by all the shiny products they're selling.
This is intended to be an observation that applies to a general audience. I'm aware of elite athletes that require significantly more guidance to achieve the levels of performance they're looking for and I'm not trying to speak to any of that.
Right, and people looking to have a scale that can track their weight over the long term and graph and look at trends is looking for the exact same market product as a workout plan.
It's like walking into the apple store and asking to buy an iphone and some guy coming up to you and telling you what you really need is a copy of the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People"
My impression is that folks that buy smartwatches for workout tracking care about their fitness, and that all the metrics collected (steps taken, heart-rate in-the-zone, etc.) will use those metrics to tune a workout plan.
I was trying to point out that, for those folks, you can skip the middle step and just adopt a real workout plan created by fitness experts, and tested in real classes.
If your point is that there are a bunch of use cases for a fitness tracker/smartwatch that are not that, it's an interesting discussion to have, since my original comment made the assumption that the majority of customers focusing on those features were in fact using them to inform a workout plan/fitness plan (could be limited to diet, which Darebee also tries to address:
It's a really fantastic resource that doesn't ask for anything, so I thought it was worth mentioning in a thread about paying $99/year for Apple Health syncing.
Never buying a Withings product again and will be getting rid of the scale that I already have. This is such anti-consumer bullshit.
i mean, you already proved to them you're the kind of people who pay a grand for a smart scale :)
Mine was $130.
i bet they move most of their inventory with sales. there's only enough people shelling 799 for a bathroom scale
Yeah, I'm sure there are some people who need to spend down their FSA or something. Withings ran the numbers and decided it was worth their return on investment, and they know way more about it than I do. However, I would not have guessed it would be enough to turn a profit.
I realized this week that most health tracking is absolutely bunk.
The most recent watchOS release (watchOS 27) has terminally altered my relationship with my Watch.
Apple adding the non-optional Smart Stack to watchOS 10 and moving the Control Center to the side button (used to be dedicated to the app switcher) was (is) massively annoying, but I made do with it.
Them adding the -- again, non-optional -- Quick Apps screen between the watch face and the App Grid *purely to support a bullshit AI feature that I DO NOT WANT* was inexcusable and put me on the edge.
It missing two alarms yesterday was the final straw that had me move the thing from my wrist to a drawer for the first time in ten years.
Every other smartwatch is a massive downgrade on iOS thanks to Apple being anti-competitively Apple. However, moving to Android will be just as massively disruptive to many of my daily workflows, and with Google locking Android up on every release and them culturally being even more "airplane the AI into your mouth" than Apple is, I don't think moving will be as beneficial as it seems in theory.
The other option, of course, was to roll the clock back to 2013 and abandon smartwatches altogether. (I was a Pebble backer and bought several while they were still around.)
So that's what I did. However, re-evaluating whether I actually _needed_ a device to capture my health metrics was a big sticking point in that decision.
I've long known that smartwatch calorie tracking has never been accurate -- too many variables related to biological makeup, and physicians never ask for HealthKit data anyway -- but there was a weird security and comfort that came with knowing that all of that was in Apple Health. (Don't get me started on sleep tracking!)
Living my life without a Watch these last two days has felt like losing an organ -- an appendix, more like. Not having a Watch sure feels liberating, though trying to make the iOS notifications system actually work for me is certainly a journey.
(I never realized how much of its clunkiness is by design. You can only set custom notifications for Mail, Calendar, calls and texts. Notifications for every other app falls into the "Default Alerts" bucket. There's no way to distinguish a ding from a ding from a ding by sound or feel (you can customize vibration patterns). You have to pick up the thing to look, but FaceID has already locked your phone...and you're deep in TikTok again. (I don't have TikTok but I could imagine this is how that cycle goes.)
As far as Withings is concerned. They created the first smart scale, which is genuinely useful (much less so iwth this change) but haven't been able to materialize much outside of that. Their smartwatches are too little, too late, and their more expensive scales are basically "we will sell you vibes and premium materials for loads; you should buy". This move feels a bit canary in the coalmine to me.
Withings can go ahead and charge for this. Either savvy people with Claude up an app to extract those data points from Withings into Apple Health anyway, or they'll roll the clock back further and just log weight with pen and paper which, as far as I know, are enshittification-proof.
But but... it has an "AI Connector" now (this is literally one of the reasons).
I honestly don't have anything against them moving apple sync behind the paywall. It's really hard to justify doing any kind of ongoing maintenance and rnd from one-time sales. If they ship good durable things, there might not be enough people willing to buy that stuff, they're also forced to constantly find new customers.
What?! How about providing value so that it is actually worth purchasing a subscription?
Subscription isn't required to use the device.
What ongoing maintenance is required beyond what would be needed to keep their app working for future sales anyway?
They do need to keep up with API changes. But that’s not that hard. Even then, they could expose a stable local API so someone else can maintain the adapter.
Right, but they need to keep up with those changes to support their continuing sales anyway, so it’s “free” to keep supporting the existing installed base too.
Why would someone else maintain the adapter? Would they be charging for maintenance (or selling data / network) as well? What company should give their business to somebody else?
I assume writing and maintaining apps across all stack of devices is real work that someone has to do full time with a decent level of quality. Unfortunately, you can't just ship software and call it done, even without adding features, new devices are getting released, new OS versions are getting released, new security updates are getting released, server infra has to be maintained and patched.
I feel that all this work isn't getting appreciated and many think that this should be offloaded to somebody else to be done for free. They already offer a free app with free CSV export.
Also, they just might have taken on too much scope and paying for all that scope isn't sustainable from hardware sales alone, unless people continue to buy, but at some point all who would buy will have their devices and scope can't be covered anymore.
I would give it a shot. Home assistant is full of adapters like this.
I though the CSV export was manual, you can’t automate it.
I assume you can reverse engineer the device API and release the compatible free app with apple health sync (and other connectors).
I’m very reluctant to put any effort in without an official stable API
You need to keep paying influencers to promote it; otherwise, influencers threaten to promote other products and drop yours. Marketing is a big cost for these products.
Just like MacroFactor pays a lot of people to promote it, it has to pay people, which means the money has to come from the customers.
It's really hard to justify doing any kind of ongoing maintenance and rnd from one-time sales.
What kind of water-carrying excuse is that? Multibillion dollar companies have been created doing exactly that for decades. Withings has somehow managed to stay in business for nearly 20 years...doing exactly that.
What if their model is sustainable only when new people keep buying? Once all who would buy bought, they can't survive on existing customer base.
If they stop being able to sell new products then they can shut down the company. That’s usually how it works.
I just don’t understand why companies think anyone would pay for that when there are alternatives. Or indeed even when there aren’t alternatives. $8/mo to save me typing in a number into apple health? In fact who even gives a shit about Apple health.
Oh. Wait. Apple does. Seems like a clever move Withings!
Buy a Pebble, is a better watch.
And it is all open-source, the best guarantee against enshitification.
I replaced my deprecated Apple Watch Ultra with a Seiko 5 GMT. It has about two days of life on a single charge, and it takes me about 10 seconds to charge it each morning by winding the little knob on the side. It's pretty and has built-in Do Not Disturb mode.
I spent a decade with a smart watch. Then I took the ultimate step against enshittification. There's nothing to subscribe to on this thing, even if I wanted to, which I certainly don't.
Similar experience. Got the original Pebble, an Android smartwatch (a couple of them), and then the new Pebble, and I've concluded that my $30 Casio G-Shock does pretty much everything I want with zero-maintenance.
Why do people use these (watches, bands, smart scales) when they are so inaccurate? It's like believing in astrology!
I am convinced people go into the market with money and a desire to get scammed and never bother to check any claims companies make about their products.
Other than tracking steps and heart rate, they aren't accurate for the other things they claim to do.
I can't believe people are using these devices and believing they are accurate.
If you want an accurate body fat percentage measurement, get a DXA scan.
Good BIA devices from InBody that are anywhere near as accurate as DXA (still far off) cost thousands of dollars.
For impedance based machines, look up InBody 970/970S and how much they cost!
Believing your Withings smart scale is accurate at all for body fat percentage measurement is like believing in a unicorn.
And for body weight measurement, you can use any cheap Chinese scale, take a photo, and most agents can read the readings off the photo and log it for you in any app, no Health Connect or HealthKit needed!
how much precision you even need for bodyweight? Chinese cheap scales are good enough and mass produced, dirt cheap. Also, your bodyweight does can vary by as much as 1.2kg or 1% of BW on day to day basis simply due to changes in hydration, gut content or hormonal effects etc... You'll need to use a "weight trend" method something like EMA-14 or SMA-7 which many fitness apps use.
We use KTS-3 (Kalman Trend Smoother) in macrocodex free app for weight trend, it's slightly better than EMA-14 but visually it's much better for the users specially the ones who aren't good at reading a chart!
OK, so you want other apps to read this data? Read on.
How much effort is needed to write an app that can take a photo, read the display, and write it to Health Connect or HealthKit? Barely a few minutes!
The same is true for a blood pressure monitor. How often do you even use it? How much effort?
Do you really even need an API? LOL.
You can find a few studies on this:
>A 2020 systematic review by Fuller et al. found that consumer wearables often perform poorly at estimating energy expenditure, even when they measure steps and heart rate reasonably well. Across brands like Apple, Garmin, Polar, and Withings, calorie burn estimates frequently showed substantial error, often in the 15–40% range and sometimes exceeding 50%. Wearables can still be useful for tracking trends, but not for precise calorie calculations.
And at the end, if you are interested in "Calorie Expenditure" or TDEE or Maintenance Calorie tracking, our sensorless approach is much more accurate and we've a completely free app with 17,000+ users already! We basically use a Neural Network, see the method here: https://macrocodex.app/knowledge/rethink/adaptive-tdee/
You can read reviews, and we guarantee results for weight loss or weight gain within 2–3 weeks (validation based on 17,000+ users), with no money, no ads served, and not even a name, phone number, or email (on Android) collected! Every user is just a number; no personally identifying information is collected.
It doesn't matter if a person has PCOD, thyroid issues, prediabetes, or is genetically resistant to fat loss: results within guaranteed 2–3 weeks and 80% will see results from the very first week! If you think our claim is outrageous, read the reviews :)
Don't trust? just read the reviews!
I convinced myself that it was for health but in practice mostly it’s for the following
0. Can see time in dark
1. Notifications, don’t have to take out the phone and doomscroll
2. Find my phone
3. Phone calls when my hands are busy and I stay away from my phone as much as possible
4. TickTick (notifications only, the app sucks on watch, use todoist if you want to USE it)
5. Timers, I follow pomodoro
I have a Withings watch and this is a good thing. Do you really trust Big Tech with all your health data being synced? No. These people will use the data in absurd ways.
No, it's absolutely not a good thing. First, I trust Apple with my health data more than I trust Withings. They have many more billions to lose if it gets out that they're abusing PHI. Second, even if Apple were evil, that means Withings is charge you $100 to send your PHI to Apple. They're profiting off the evil.
There's no reasonable way to describe this as a good thing.
Counting steps or any thing else on a Apple Watch is sad, just like this.
Pointless accounting, life is not an account or stock graph.
Sounds like they've been bought by private equity parasites. Why else would you do this?
Their clarification says all users will always be able to export csv etc - which I have done many times to analyse my sleep.
I don't really use HealthKit but out of principle I'm going to look into releasing a free tool that specifically syncs your free Withings export data into Apple Health.