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Posted by johnbehnke 1 hour ago

New Withings Users Must Pay $99/Year for Apple Health Syncing(support.withings.com)
74 points | 46 comments
ShakataGaNai 12 minutes ago|
#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).

itopaloglu83 8 minutes ago|
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.

mikestew 38 minutes ago||
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. :-)

wat10000 24 minutes ago||
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.
Hamuko 32 minutes ago||
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.
baxtr 30 seconds ago||
Has anyone vibe-coded a reverse engineered clone app yet? Should be doable today.
PSNapier 25 minutes ago||
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.

rootusrootus 4 minutes ago||
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.
cebert 58 minutes ago||
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.
thway15269037 13 minutes ago||
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.

MisterMunchkin 9 minutes ago||
I’m surprised it’s not already forbidden in training. They won’t even mention brands or characters because that’s wrongthink.
thway15269037 1 minute ago||
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.

tonyedgecombe 53 minutes ago|||
I'm coming to the conclusion that my life is improved the more I can leave these technologies alone.
mijoharas 52 minutes ago|||
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

CamperBob2 50 minutes ago||
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.

eitally 49 minutes ago|||
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).
itopaloglu83 18 minutes ago|||
We need an open firmware for these scales.

I just need a scale that syncs with my phone, and none of those subscriptions.

Analemma_ 26 minutes ago|||
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.
Terr_ 20 minutes ago||
Something something think of the children.

Except it'll all be locked down into a lower-bidder insecure state too.

toomuchtodo 28 minutes ago||
Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058850 - October 2026

https://github.com/morluto/rea

https://rea.tools

MisterMunchkin 9 minutes ago||
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.
tibbon 8 minutes ago|
Reminds me of Chamberlain and their garage door openers...
msy 46 minutes ago||
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.
loloquwowndueo 29 minutes ago||
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.

brador 3 minutes ago|
Best thing about minimalism is realising you don’t need mental load junk.
techdiff 33 minutes ago|
This is up there with BMW charging a subscription for heated seats.
lokar 1 minute ago||
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.

netsharc 17 minutes ago||
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...

lokar 48 seconds ago||
I see you did not grow up going out to the driveway to start the car before breakfast :)
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