#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.<p>#2 - If you have the apps today, you should warn other users with a review (which may or may not be 1 star).<p>#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.<p>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>file a complaint with your OAG</i><p>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.)<p>Though heading that off might be why this is only "starting from October 13th, 2026" and in respect of "any new Withings account."
Oh John, what have you done.<p>APPLE enshittifying its platform was not on my bingo card.
<a href="https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines</a><p>4.10:<p><i>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>
But they are monetizing the export button you press before the api call is made.
Nordictrack does this with iFit as well. Can’t sync to Apple Health without a paid account. Syncing is somewhat janky too.
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 <i>possibly</i> seen this backlash coming.<p>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. :-)
Because people will pay; that's why.
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".<p>Sorry if this isn't helpful.<p>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.
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.
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.
Fun story: when I got my Withings watch 5-6 years ago couldn't get it Bluetooth paired with my phone. Contacted support.<p>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<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
got a link to that comment in the sister thread?
I don't have the scale, but I got the protocol for the watch and it'll probably be similar enough.<p>Been using my implementation exclusively for months, seems fine.<p><a href="https://github.com/davidventura/withouthings" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/davidventura/withouthings</a>
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.<p>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.
Used to be a thing before LLMs too.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/oliexdev/openScale/issues/786" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oliexdev/openScale/issues/786</a>
True but it's good to see access to our own devices democratized, for once.<p>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).
We need an open firmware for these scales.<p>I just need a scale that syncs with my phone, and none of those subscriptions.
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>Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058850">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058850</a> - October 2026<p><a href="https://github.com/morluto/rea" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/morluto/rea</a><p><a href="https://rea.tools" rel="nofollow">https://rea.tools</a>
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'm not as optimistic. I think we're in a <i>very</i> 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 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.<p>With Withings firmly off the list, what's the best alternative for something that's accurate and reliably syncs with Apple Health?
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.<p>Is anyone doing scales, sleep sensors, and BP cuffs that don’t use the cloud at all?
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.
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.
Reminds me of Chamberlain and their garage door openers...
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 will bet that $99 they can’t make it stick. 1990s business practices in an age of reverse-engineering LLMs
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.
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.<p>Heated steering wheel on the other hand; that's heavenly.<p>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"?<p>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: <a href="https://www.drive.com.au/news/bmw-admits-heated-seat-subscriptions-were-a-mistake/" rel="nofollow">https://www.drive.com.au/news/bmw-admits-heated-seat-subscri...</a>
> <i>Heated steering wheel on the other hand; that's heavenly</i><p>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 <i>except</i> for the heated steering wheel.
> <i>when you've left your car in below zero weather it's useful</i><p>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.
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.
I see you did not grow up going out to the driveway to start the car before breakfast :)
You can buy the feature outright when you order the car.<p>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.<p>It has two obvious consumer benefits: second hand sales (the new owner may really want it), and very occasional use.
What’s withings?<p>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.
Back in 2016, an update bricked my Withings scale. I don't think I've considered them again since.
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.<p>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.<p>Amazing how they were from good, to bad, to terrible.
I do not care for Withings software or subscriptions, but their hardware is so nice.
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
Has anyone vibe-coded a reverse engineered clone app yet? Should be doable today.
For Android+watch, yes, scale likely compatible with some small amount of work<p><a href="https://github.com/davidventura/withouthings" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/davidventura/withouthings</a>
I was gonna say, I’d be shocked if it already wasn’t from the home assistant community.
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 <i>all</i> 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 <i>entire</i> projected revenue gains from the fee.
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.
I realized this week that most health tracking is absolutely bunk.<p>The most recent watchOS release (watchOS 27) has terminally altered my relationship with my Watch.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.)<p>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.<p>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!)<p>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.<p>(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.)<p>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.<p>Withings can go ahead and charge for this. Either savvy people with Claude up a script 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 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://darebee.com/" rel="nofollow">https://darebee.com/</a>
Why does everything on this website have to be a bait-and-switch funnel to some kind of (self-)Promotion.
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?
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.
<i>It's really hard to justify doing any kind of ongoing maintenance and rnd from one-time sales.</i><p>What kind of water-carrying excuse is that? Multibillion dollar companies have been created doing exactly that for <i>decades</i>. Withings has somehow managed to stay in business for nearly 20 years...doing exactly that.
What ongoing maintenance is required beyond what would be needed to keep their app working for future sales anyway?
What?! How about providing value so that it is actually worth purchasing a subscription?
The entire economy is a grift now.
But but... it has an "AI Connector" now (this is literally one of the reasons).
Buy a Pebble, is a better watch.<p>And it is all open-source, the best guarantee against enshitification.
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Counting steps or any thing else on a Apple Watch is sad, just like this.<p>Pointless accounting, life is not an account or stock graph.