YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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. :-)

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.

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/

#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).

Pointless accounting, life is not an account or stock graph.

And it is all open-source, the best guarantee against enshitification.

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.

With Withings firmly off the list, what's the best alternative for something that's accurate and reliably syncs with Apple Health?

Is anyone doing scales, sleep sensors, and BP cuffs that don’t use the cloud at all?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The cuff works well, I enter the numbers manually, no failures so far.

Oh. Wait. Apple does. Seems like a clever move Withings!

I am convinced people go into the market with money and a desire to get scammed and never bother to check any claims companies make about their products.

Other than tracking steps and heart rate, they aren't accurate for the other things they claim to do.

I can't believe people are using these devices and believing they are accurate.

If you want an accurate body fat percentage measurement, get a DXA scan.

Good BIA devices from InBody that are anywhere near as accurate as DXA (still far off) cost thousands of dollars.

For impedance based machines, look up InBody 970/970S and how much they cost!

Believing your Withings smart scale is accurate at all for body fat percentage measurement is like believing in a unicorn.

And for body weight measurement, you can use any cheap Chinese scale, take a photo, and most agents can read the readings off the photo and log it for you in any app, no Health Connect or HealthKit needed!

how much precision you even need for bodyweight? Chinese cheap scales are good enough and mass produced, dirt cheap. Also, your bodyweight does can vary by as much as 1.2kg or 1% of BW on day to day basis simply due to changes in hydration, gut content or hormonal effects etc... You'll need to use a "weight trend" method something like EMA-14 or SMA-7 which many fitness apps use.

We use KTS-3 (Kalman Trend Smoother) in macrocodex free app for weight trend, it's slightly better than EMA-14 but visually it's much better for the users specially the ones who aren't good at reading a chart!

OK, so you want other apps to read this data? Read on.

How much effort is needed to write an app that can take a photo, read the display, and write it to Health Connect or HealthKit? Barely a few minutes!

The same is true for a blood pressure monitor. How often do you even use it? How much effort?

Do you really even need an API? LOL.

You can find a few studies on this:

>A 2020 systematic review by Fuller et al. found that consumer wearables often perform poorly at estimating energy expenditure, even when they measure steps and heart rate reasonably well. Across brands like Apple, Garmin, Polar, and Withings, calorie burn estimates frequently showed substantial error, often in the 15–40% range and sometimes exceeding 50%. Wearables can still be useful for tracking trends, but not for precise calorie calculations.

And at the end, if you are interested in "Calorie Expenditure" or TDEE or Maintenance Calorie tracking, our sensorless approach is much more accurate and we've a completely free app with 17,000+ users already! We basically use a Neural Network, see the method here: https://macrocodex.app/knowledge/rethink/adaptive-tdee/

You can read reviews, and we guarantee results for weight loss or weight gain within 2–3 weeks (validation based on 17,000+ users), with no money, no ads served, and not even a name, phone number, or email (on Android) collected! Every user is just a number; no personally identifying information is collected.

It doesn't matter if a person has PCOD, thyroid issues, prediabetes, or is genetically resistant to fat loss: results within guaranteed 2–3 weeks and 80% will see results from the very first week! If you think our claim is outrageous, read the reviews :)

Don't trust? just read the reviews!

Hello everyone, we discovered a new revenue stream:

Starting from October 17th, 2026 every comment on this thread will cost you 50 cents, and every like - 10 cents.

OR you can subscribe to Withings+ and get these features for free

Only issue I've experienced is that background sync just stops working sometimes. Then I need to open the app manually to sync.

I’ve had this for, I think, two or three years now and really liked the hardware in both aesthetics and battery life. Bought it after abandoning Fitbit when they became part of Google.

The software has become noticeable worse recently, and this is the last straw where I will actively recommend _against_ buying them. The brands doing enshitification has to stop and Withings is now one of them.

> Withering, an open source Withings app written in Rust.

Their clarification says all users will always be able to export csv etc - which I have done many times to analyse my sleep.

I don't really use HealthKit but out of principle I'm going to look into releasing a free tool that specifically syncs your free Withings export data into Apple Health.

However, even if the sync for me as existing customer still works, I don't support paywalling basic functionality. Thus, for my future purchases I will choose a different brand. That's imho the only language companies understand: Lost revenue.

It was nice as long as it lasted.

Looking at the support forums many others had issues with their then new app replacing a working one.

So I don't think this will have much effect as it didn't work anyway.

So, I can understand why Withings does not want to be the one doing the hard work of data collection, while Apple is preparing its own subscription for Health services.

Someone build a new Apple Withings client or api-bridge.

Hm. I wonder if I can use a RPi Zero to read the console output of a medical scale and write it to Apple Health for my profile…

Been a good time for a while. Too many scandals, too much to look after, too many economical problems.

When people don't even have the mental strength to give blowback, google blocks and constraints android, new mandatory subscriptions come up.

What are you going to do, boycott and switch brands and buy another pc? with these prices?

What a time to be alive.

It's a shame because I liked their spin on a hybrid smart watch which looked like a traditional analog watch. Garmin does make hybrids, but to me they all look too sporty or tactical.

It's a hard feeling to explain, when purchasing any "high cost" tech device, I like to think i'm a smart consumer and do my research.

Nope. This company is, for back of a better word, disgusting. Never in my life have I had to maintain a profesional relationship with support agents for sake of: -charger breaking repeatedly -Syncing breaking repeatedlty -BIometrics are completely, completely random and arbitrary compared to other professional devices. -time desync -Completely, baffling missing integrations. (I can't configure a god damn alarm?) -The big one, dynamic paywalling. Since I purchased mine, I have been locked out of the few worthwhile features that the app/device initially offered.

The scanwatch 2 is completely useless as a watch and a health device. It is marginally acceptable as a fashion device.

Sadly the better experience is at odds with most business models these days...

The E in IOT stands for Ethics.

supposedly someone is getting bonus for loosing customers, that's how it works?