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 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.
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.
Sounds like some PM is jealour of Whoop and trying to launder the cost and boost adoption of their unwanted AI integration behind a heavily used existing feature.
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. :-)
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. :-)
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.
The last set of updates seems to have fixed my sync issues. I have no idea why this is so hard, except maybe their team architected things incorrectly.
I believe the readings go to their cloud first then the app reads from there, which is one of those things that makes you realize hardware guys shouldn't design software.
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.
No, I understand what you're saying. But they absolutely aren't doing that and there's no way they were eating the hardware cost as a loss-leader on future recurring revenue. The buyers paid for the hardware and then needed to pay for software to enable it.
Vehicle pricing is entirely a market decision, and targets a certain profit margin. You will absolutely have less profit margin on something where you believe you can make up that revenue on a subscription.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Yeah all the 3rd party printer cartridges do this. Their reviews are for other random products. Drives me nuts. They sell paperclips for a while, accumulate hundreds of 5-star reviews because it's hard to screw up paperclips, and then swap the paperclip listing out for a shitty, leaky printer cartridge.
Where the hell are the good 3rd party cartridges? They're almost impossible to find.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Yep, and I'm saying that those four years ago (or whatever time it was) I was convinced that it is against this specific App Store guideline, but alas Apple has approved it.
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.
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).
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 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.
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https://rea.tools
Now do iOS.
I just need a scale that syncs with my phone, and none of those subscriptions.
The question is who and when first blinks.
Other countries won't care and let people reverse engineer away.
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).
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.
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.
I think I’m going to have a crack at with with Claude and REA this weekend, if nothing else comes up.
Been using my implementation exclusively for months, seems fine.
https://github.com/davidventura/withouthings
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49550436
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
It's what they were taught in business school.
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.
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.
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.
I believe the readings go to their cloud first then the app reads from there, which is one of those things that makes you realize hardware guys shouldn't design software.
No one serious uses them for anything, bodyweight can be measured using any cheap scale
Bodyfat%, withings is very unreliable for this.
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...
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.
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.
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).
Also good for those of us with back issues. I use mine even in the summer sometimes for that reason.
My Civic remote start with the key fob will automatically turn them on when it's cold.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Got the Scanwatch on an employer discount deal with Withings, still wasted $180.
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/
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.
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"
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.#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).
APPLE enshittifying its platform was not on my bingo card.
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.
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.
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.
I bought them a year ago and today they showed me an ad ON MY THERMOSTAT.
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.
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.
Reviews just don't work when the user pool goes below a certain "average honesty level"
Where the hell are the good 3rd party cartridges? They're almost impossible to find.
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.
Green text bubbles, "[Person] reacted to this message", and mandatory $150 monitor stands come to mind.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-monitor-stand-price-re...
https://github.com/davidventura/withouthings
Pointless accounting, life is not an account or stock graph.
And it is all open-source, the best guarantee against enshitification.
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.
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.
Because YouTube is breaking that rule by monetizing background operation.
Can you explain how you see it as one?
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.
So… not exactly new for iPhone users.
> 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.
Even Apple themselves do it, I see apple send me push notifications that are ads for Apple Arcade all the time.
Cloud import is only supported from health providers and laboratories.
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.
With Withings firmly off the list, what's the best alternative for something that's accurate and reliably syncs with Apple Health?
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.