Withings, which makes products for tracking your health, announced recently that as of October 13, new customers must buy a $100-a-year Withings+ subscription to enable syncing their health data to Apple Health and other third-party apps, a feature that was previously free.

“Matteo A” writes in the Withings support forums:

I reached out to Customer Support and their response was completely contradictory. They claimed that syncing with Apple Health is a “standard feature that does not require a subscription,” but in the very next sentence, they confirmed that “any account created after October 13th will be asked to sign up for a Withings+ subscription in order to export data” justifying it with new “privacy measures” and an “AI connector”.

Let’s be clear: writing data to Apple Health via HealthKit happens locally on the phone. It does not require complex cloud compute, server costs, or any “AI connector”. It’s a basic API call.

Matteo A calls this “unacceptable,” and as a Withings customer (we have a Body Cardio scale and BPM Connect cuff, but no subscription), I wholeheartedly agree, despite being unaffected by this change. Matteo A is also right that syncing to Apple Health is a basic API call. Charging for that is likewise unacceptable.

Hold that thought.

“Markus From Withings” responded:

We’ve been closely following the active discussions regarding the recent updates, and we’d like to offer some clarity and reassurance about what is changing and who is affected.

1.) If you already have a Withings account, nothing changes. If you created your account on or before October 12, 2026, automatic third-party sync stays free. This is tied to your account, not your device, so buying a new scale, watch or any other Withings device in the future won’t affect it. Your sync stays free.

2.) Every user, member or not, can export their full history as CSV or PDF at any time, keep importing data from other apps, and share data with their doctor through HealthLink and PDF reports. None of this is behind a paywall.

What’s changing for new members: for accounts created from October 13, 2026, automatic sync to third-party apps is part of Withings+.

That’s neither “clarity” nor “reassurance”—it’s garbled confirmation designed to confuse.

Withings blames the policy change on its use of “AI,” adding a disclaimer to the top of its “Partners - Exporting From Withings to Partner Apps” support page:

The activation of our Withings AI connector has required changes to our API and new privacy measures.

The “Withings AI Connector FAQ” explains further:

We’re rolling out our Withings AI Connector MCP (Model Context Protocol) which is an open-source way for customers to interact with our Health Assistant. This significant upgrade has necessitated a few changes to how accounts access their data when transferring it to and from partners, and for us to make certain changes to our privacy policy.

In other words, “we secretly replaced the perfectly fine and free sync feature with rich, dark, sparkling AI, and now we can’t afford our token usage bill.”

Enshittification comes for everyone, and AI makes enshittification faster.

Apple may have something to say about it, though. Going back to Matteo A’s “basic API call,” Apple’s App Review Guidelines prohibit monetizing built-in capabilities:

4.10 Monetizing Built-In Capabilities

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.

Apple Health is part of iOS, and HealthKit is documented right alongside the Screen Time APIs Apple calls out.

Apple would be perfectly justified in rejecting the Withings app for gating Apple Health syncing behind a subscription.

Not that they will. YouTube, for example, has gated background video playback behind a subscription for years despite it being easily enabled. I’ve never understood Apple’s enforcement of this guideline; as some developers have discovered, it can be arbitrary, and the “solution” seems to be to bundle more features alongside the built-in capabilities. Charge for background video? Rejected. Charge for background video and no ads? Approved. Totally logical.

(Via Joe Rossignol at MacRumors. See Also, Hacker News)