The IT Nerd

In the most clearest cash grab ever, Withing who make scales that measure anything from heart rate to weight among other items have decided that if you created an account on or after October 13, 2026, you are required to pay a $99 Withings+ subscription to sync their scale data with Apple Health. If you have created an account before that, nothing changes for you. And once the company posted their official response, the rage from the Internet was evident. Here’s a few examples:

What an absolute trash decision they are making. I will never be buying a Withings product again nor will I ever be subscribing to anything. This is pure greed.

And:

I’ve been a Withings user for about 15 years now, recently bought a Body Fit, but honestly this absolutely disgusts me and I’m now actively looking at options to dump the lot. I’d rather support an honest company that actually cares about their users. Withings clearly don’t.

This is pure corporate greed and the epitome of ‘enshittification’ and I’m done with it.

And:

I’m gradually leaving Withings, enshittification is underway. I just need a good replacement for the smart scales.

And:

It’s only a matter of time before existing users are forced to use the subscription.

That last part is what catches my attention. This is going to migrate down to existing users if they feel that new users will comply with this. And what makes this worse is that this might ever violate Apple’s own guidelines:

That’s interesting. I for one want to see how this plays out because there’s the potential that Apple will smack these people down. But at the very least, users are revolting and Withings will have to figure this out to make users happy. Because they clearly are not happy.

Let’s see if Withings figures it out.

Withings is a popular choice for people who want high tech gear to help manage their health. They make smart scales, smart watches, smart thermometers and the like and are sold in places like the Apple Store. All of this gear tied their cloud services. And at present it appears that they have an issue with their cloud services in relation to those who are on iOS. Reports started to filter in that the iOS app would crash upon starting. Since I have one of their smart scales, I was able to screen record this issue so you can see what I am talking about:

What’s interesting is that the first time you run it, it crashes. But when you check to see what’s running, Health Mate is still running. When you access it, it crashes again. I am able to replicate this on multiple devices and my wife was able to replicate this as well. The reason why I know that this is a back end issue with Withings cloud services is that if you put your phone into airplane mode, it will not crash. That implies that the app itself isn’t the issue.

Checking the Withings forums, you can find that this has happened before. This thread was started about two years ago and a recent post indicates you should be running version 5.0 to avoid this. Well, I am running 5.0.2 and so is my wife and I still have the issue. Three other threads have been spun up reporting this issue as well. It isn’t clear if Withings is working on this, but there’s clearly an issue that Withings has had before that they clearly can’t wrap their arms around as this shouldn’t be happening.

The only work around that I can see is to log into their web portal and see your info there. But you can’t configure your Withings gear from there, and some Withings gear requires you to use the app to use the gear in question. So clearly Withings needs to put their big boy pants on and address this issue quickly. Because this is the sort of thing that leaves a bad taste in users mouths and make them look for other products from other companies who might deliver more reliable service.

UPDATE: Withings is apparently aware of this:

UPDATE #2: I might have found a POSSIBLE fix for this. Details here.