HN

Comments (118)

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  ShakataGaNai
  #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).
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  mikestew
  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. :-)
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  ben1040
  https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines4.10: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.
• PSNapier
  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] ohAnd 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.
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  cebert
  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.
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  techdiff
  This is up there with BMW charging a subscription for heated seats.
• gregglain
  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.
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  MisterMunchkin
  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.
• msy
  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.
• mortenjorck
  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?
• rootusrootus
  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.
• wl
  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?
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  loloquwowndueo
  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.
• TomAnthony
  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.
• michaelhoney
  I will bet that $99 they can’t make it stick. 1990s business practices in an age of reverse-engineering LLMs
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  PeterUstinox
  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.
• ost-ing
  Me and my partner bought Withings watches - neither of us will buy them again. Very very poor customer service
• juiceland
  Alright lads, what scale are we moving on to now?
• lowbloodsugar
  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!
• kstrauser
  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.
• fintler
  Back in 2016, an update bricked my Withings scale. I don't think I've considered them again since.
• TrainedMonkey
  I do not care for Withings software or subscriptions, but their hardware is so nice.
• altairprime
  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.
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  baxtr
  Has anyone vibe-coded a reverse engineered clone app yet? Should be doable today.
• jmbwell
  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
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  alistairSH
  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.
• adocomplete
  Never buying a Withings product again and will be getting rid of the scale that I already have. This is such anti-consumer bullshit.
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  rpdillon
  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/
• nonfamous
  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.
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  TheCoelacanth
  The entire economy is a grift now.
• nunez
  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.
• niels8472
  But but... it has an "AI Connector" now (this is literally one of the reasons).
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  haute_cuisine
  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.
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  diego_moita
  Buy a Pebble, is a better watch.And it is all open-source, the best guarantee against enshitification.
• anon
  undefined
• jasonmp85
  [dead]
• MiroslavPokorny
  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.