today at 9:34 PM
#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).
today at 9:38 PM
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.
today at 9:49 PM
Tricking the customer into an exploitative subscription is more profitable than earning loyalty by providing good value.
today at 9:56 PM
> 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."
today at 9:50 PM
Oh John, what have you done.
APPLE enshittifying its platform was not on my bingo card.
today at 9:59 PM
this isn't Apple though?
today at 10:06 PM
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.
today at 10:49 PM
But they are monetizing the export button you press before the api call is made.
today at 10:21 PM
Nordictrack does this with iFit as well. Can’t sync to Apple Health without a paid account. Syncing is somewhat janky too.
today at 9:09 PM
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. :-)
today at 9:52 PM
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.
today at 10:50 PM
Because people will pay; that's why.
today at 9:23 PM
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.
today at 9:14 PM
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.
today at 9:21 PM
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.
today at 8:48 PM
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.
today at 9:34 PM
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.
today at 9:38 PM
I’m surprised it’s not already forbidden in training. They won’t even mention brands or characters because that’s wrongthink.
today at 9:45 PM
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.
today at 9:49 PM
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.
today at 9:56 PM
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.
today at 10:12 PM
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.
today at 9:48 PM
got a link to that comment in the sister thread?
today at 10:02 PM
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
today at 8:54 PM
I'm coming to the conclusion that my life is improved the more I can leave these technologies alone.
today at 10:09 PM
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.
today at 8:54 PM
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
today at 8:56 PM
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.
today at 8:57 PM
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).
today at 9:29 PM
We need an open firmware for these scales.
I just need a scale that syncs with my phone, and none of those subscriptions.
today at 9:51 PM
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.
today at 10:11 PM
Maybe LLMs are going to help free us from enshittification. For now.
today at 9:18 PM
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
today at 9:50 PM
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.
today at 9:20 PM
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.
today at 9:26 PM
Something something think of the children.
Except it'll all be locked down into a lower-bidder insecure state too.
today at 10:15 PM
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?
today at 10:30 PM
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?
today at 9:37 PM
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.
today at 10:51 PM
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.
today at 9:38 PM
Reminds me of Chamberlain and their garage door openers...
today at 9:00 PM
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.
today at 10:12 PM
I will bet that $99 they can’t make it stick. 1990s business practices in an age of reverse-engineering LLMs
today at 9:43 PM
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.
today at 9:14 PM
This is up there with BMW charging a subscription for heated seats.
today at 9:29 PM
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...
today at 10:13 PM
> 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.
today at 10:04 PM
> 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.
today at 9:50 PM
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.
today at 9:46 PM
I see you did not grow up going out to the driveway to start the car before breakfast :)
today at 9:48 PM
Grew up in a warm place. Currently my car sleeps in a relatively warm underground carpark of the apartment block.
today at 9:59 PM
We had to plug our (gas) car in at night. I don’t recommend it.
today at 9:45 PM
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.
today at 9:17 PM
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.
today at 9:49 PM
But how do you know when to stand?
today at 9:57 PM
You don’t stand on a treadmill. Ever. That’s how I know.
today at 10:03 PM
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.
today at 10:46 PM
Good news you don’t have to wait. Sell the thing.
today at 9:43 PM
Best thing about minimalism is realising you don’t need mental load junk.
today at 10:13 PM
Back in 2016, an update bricked my Withings scale. I don't think I've considered them again since.
today at 9:24 PM
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.
today at 10:15 PM
I do not care for Withings software or subscriptions, but their hardware is so nice.
today at 10:20 PM
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
today at 9:46 PM
Has anyone vibe-coded a reverse engineered clone app yet? Should be doable today.
today at 10:04 PM
For Android+watch, yes, scale likely compatible with some small amount of work
https://github.com/davidventura/withouthings
today at 10:14 PM
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.
today at 9:47 PM
I was gonna say, I’d be shocked if it already wasn’t from the home assistant community.
today at 8:11 PM
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.
today at 9:01 PM
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.
today at 9:08 PM
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
today at 9:28 PM
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.
today at 9:49 PM
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/
today at 10:00 PM
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.
today at 9:59 PM
today at 9:13 PM
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.
today at 9:22 PM
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.
today at 10:21 PM
Seriously? That’s awful by design. I figured it was BT from scale to phone app.
today at 10:32 PM
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
today at 10:31 PM
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.
today at 10:48 PM
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.
today at 9:26 PM
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.
today at 9:29 PM
Why does everything on this website have to be a bait-and-switch funnel to some kind of (self-)Promotion.
today at 9:34 PM
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?
today at 9:14 PM
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.
today at 9:25 PM
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.
today at 10:10 PM
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.
today at 9:25 PM
What ongoing maintenance is required beyond what would be needed to keep their app working for future sales anyway?
today at 9:50 PM
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.
today at 9:58 PM
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.
today at 10:10 PM
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.
today at 10:32 PM
I assume you can reverse engineer the device API and release the compatible free app with apple health sync (and other connectors).
today at 9:54 PM
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.
today at 9:16 PM
What?! How about providing value so that it is actually worth purchasing a subscription?
today at 9:52 PM
Subscription isn't required to use the device.
today at 8:58 PM
The entire economy is a grift now.
today at 9:32 PM
That's late stage capitalism for ya.
today at 9:06 PM
But but... it has an "AI Connector" now (this is literally one of the reasons).
today at 9:54 PM
Buy a Pebble, is a better watch.
And it is all open-source, the best guarantee against enshitification.
today at 10:10 PM
[dead]
today at 9:47 PM
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.