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ShakataGaNai 23 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).
JumpCrisscross 40 seconds ago [-]
> file a complaint with your OAG
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.
itopaloglu83 19 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.
rectang 8 minutes ago [-]
Tricking the customer into an exploitative subscription is more profitable than earning loyalty by providing good value.
sheepscreek 7 minutes ago [-]
Oh John, what have you done.
APPLE enshittifying its platform was not on my bingo card.
PSNapier 36 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.
mikestew 48 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. :-)
js2 5 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
wat10000 35 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 43 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.
cebert 1 hours 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 24 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.
toyg 52 seconds ago [-]
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.
MisterMunchkin 19 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 12 minutes 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.
randomblock1 9 minutes ago [-]
What AI are you using? Image generators are kinda like this but AFAIK no LLMs do this. Maybe a little or warning about copyright at most for specific use cases.
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.
tonyedgecombe 1 hours ago [-]
I'm coming to the conclusion that my life is improved the more I can leave these technologies alone.
mijoharas 1 hours 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.
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 1 hours 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 29 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.
k4rli 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
Analemma_ 37 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_ 31 minutes ago [-]
Something something think of the children.
Except it'll all be locked down into a lower-bidder insecure state too.
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.
MisterMunchkin 20 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 19 minutes ago [-]
Reminds me of Chamberlain and their garage door openers...
msy 57 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 40 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.
jkestner 8 minutes ago [-]
But how do you know when to stand?
brador 14 minutes ago [-]
Best thing about minimalism is realising you don’t need mental load junk.
baxtr 11 minutes ago [-]
Has anyone vibe-coded a reverse engineered clone app yet? Should be doable today.
dawnerd 10 minutes ago [-]
I was gonna say, I’d be shocked if it already wasn’t from the home assistant community.
techdiff 44 minutes ago [-]
This is up there with BMW charging a subscription for heated seats.
netsharc 28 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"?
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.
lokar 11 minutes ago [-]
I see you did not grow up going out to the driveway to start the car before breakfast :)
netsharc 9 minutes ago [-]
Grew up in a warm place. Currently my car sleeps in a relatively warm underground carpark of the apartment block.
lokar 12 minutes 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.
MiroslavPokorny 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
TomAnthony 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
alistairSH 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
iAMkenough 49 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, I got turned off when I realized you can’t sync these devices via Bluetooth or LAN.
Required path is:
Scale data -> WiFi -> Internet -> Withings app -> HealthKit
altairprime 29 minutes ago [-]
There’s an HA integration path for the scale to HA but I don’t believe anyone has yet built the HA to HealthKit side of that.
iAMkenough 8 minutes ago [-]
Doesn’t that require using the Withings API (cloud)?
Is that my problem? I figured that WiFi access was enough to hit my phone to update HealthKit, but I never gave the scale access to the Internet ("you can go live over there on the IoT VLAN with the other tattletale devices").
Well, fuck that. Now I'm really, really, really not going to buy a Withings product again.
iAMkenough 35 minutes ago [-]
Mine died after a year, which I suspect is because my spouse used it after showers, and they’re not designed to handle bathroom moisture. Not even rated as water resistant.
Never again.
altairprime 2 hours ago [-]
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.
diego_moita 3 minutes ago [-]
Buy a Pebble, is a better watch.
And it is all open-source, the best guarantee against enshitification.
rpdillon 31 minutes ago [-]
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?
hypfer 28 minutes ago [-]
Why does everything on this website have to be a bait-and-switch funnel to some kind of (self-)Promotion.
niels8472 51 minutes ago [-]
But but... it has an "AI Connector" now (this is literally one of the reasons).
haute_cuisine 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
mikestew 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
wat10000 32 minutes ago [-]
What ongoing maintenance is required beyond what would be needed to keep their app working for future sales anyway?
lokar 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
wat10000 3 minutes ago [-]
Right, but they need to keep up with those changes to support their continuing sales anyway, so it’s “free” to keep supporting the existing installed base too.
ebtebt 41 minutes ago [-]
What?! How about providing value so that it is actually worth purchasing a subscription?
#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).
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.
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.
APPLE enshittifying its platform was not on my bingo card.
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.
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. :-)
The question is who and when first blinks.
Not that I want it -- my tokens are not free -- but it's here. Up for grabs.
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
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.
I just need a scale that syncs with my phone, and none of those subscriptions.
Except it'll all be locked down into a lower-bidder insecure state too.
https://github.com/morluto/rea
https://rea.tools
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.
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...
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.
Pointless accounting, life is not an account or stock graph.
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.
Required path is: Scale data -> WiFi -> Internet -> Withings app -> HealthKit
Looks like HA updated their documentation to reflect the $99/yr requirement: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/withings/
Well, fuck that. Now I'm really, really, really not going to buy a Withings product again.
Never again.
And it is all open-source, the best guarantee against enshitification.
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/
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.