Discussion
Withings wants about $100 a year to sync your scale with Apple Health...
Anyone who creates a Withings account on October 13 or later needs a Withings+ subscription for automatic syncing to Apple Health, MacRumors reported, at $99.50 a year in the U.S. Tech Between the Lines found the App Store listing at $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year. Accounts created on or before October 12 keep syncing for free.
Either is a fair reason to charge for a service on top of the device.
The rule also covers other apps that pull data through Withings' free developer plan, including apps already on the market, iDevice reported, and new users can't get around it by routing their data through Apple Health or Google's system instead. A thread on Withings' own community calls the change unacceptable right in its title.
Before I bought any connected scale, blood pressure cuff or watch, I'd check three things: whether syncing to Apple Health or Google's health app needs a paid plan, whether I can export my full history as a file, and what happens to that data if I stop paying. Withings still lets every user export a full history as a CSV or PDF, iThinkDiff reported. If you already own a Withings device, I'd hang on to that account, because the exemption follows the account, not the device.
My weight, sent from my own bathroom floor to my own phone, is a strange thing to rent back to me.
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iThinkDiff reported that a new account on Android also needs it for automatic transfers to Health Connect. A reply marked as Withings' official response, quoted by Engadget, says "automatic sync to third-party apps is part of Withings+."
Gadgets & Wearables reported that Withings says subscription revenue helps fund clinical validation, regulatory work and the infrastructure behind it, and iThinkDiff reported Withings ties the change to API updates and new privacy measures for its AI connector.