Withings Now Charges New Users to Sync With Apple Health. Data Portability Just Became a Subscription Feature

For more than a decade the deal with a smart scale was simple: buy the hardware, and your weight goes wherever you send it. On 13 October Withings changed the deal. A Withings account created since then sends nothing to Apple Health, Health Connect or any other app unless the user pays for Withings+, at $99.50 a year in the US [1][2].

Withings frames it as funding the services around the data: “your data itself stays yours” [3]. That is true of the data inside the Withings app. What now costs money is the data leaving it. For anyone building on health data, that is a new kind of platform change. Strava and Google changed what developers can do [4]. Withings has changed what users can do, and apps find out only when the data stops arriving.

Who now needs Withings+ to sync with Apple Health?

• Consumer sync. For accounts created on or after 13 October 2026, automatic sync to Apple Health, Health Connect and other third-party apps requires Withings+, at $99.50 a year or $9.95 a month in the US [1][2]. Withings’ support reply puts it plainly: “automatic sync to third-party apps is part of Withings+” [2].
• The AI Connector. Withings’ MCP server, which lets Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini read a user’s Withings data, sits behind the same subscription for new accounts [5]. Withings tied the change to the connector, saying its rollout “required API changes and additional privacy measures” [1].
• The developer API. A banner on Withings’ developer site says Withings+ becomes required on the free “Start for Free” API plan from 12 October, including for apps already live, for accounts created after that date. Withings says its Enterprise plan lifts the requirement for specific use cases [6].
• What stays free. Data and trends inside the Withings app, and manual export of history as CSV or PDF [2][3].
• Who is exempt. Accounts created before the cutoff, whatever they buy later. The rule follows the account, not the device [1].

The two dates, 12 October for the API plan and 13 October for consumer sync, come from different Withings pages [1][6]. If you are deciding whether a particular user is affected, check their account creation date against both.

There is an irony in the route that got paywalled. In 2023 Withings told Google that moving its third-party sharing onto Health Connect, so users could grant new apps access without Withings building each connection, cut its sync code by half [12]. The phone health stores made sharing cheap for Withings. They are now the thing Withings charges for.

Why apps find out last

Most apps never call Withings directly. They read weight, body fat and blood pressure from Apple Health or Health Connect, where the Withings app writes them. For a new Withings user without Withings+, the Withings app no longer writes anything. Your app’s permission prompt still succeeds, your code still runs, and the query still returns an empty result.

That makes the failure easy to miss in three specific ways:

• Testing passes. Your test accounts were almost certainly created before 13 October, so they still sync. TryTerra makes the same point: results from an older account will differ from a new one [1].
• The gap looks like disengagement. A user who stops weighing in and a user whose scale never synced produce the same empty chart. Retention dashboards will count both as drop-off.
• Support tickets arrive confused. The user sees their weight in the Withings app and reasonably assumes your app is broken.

The people most exposed are the ones Withings sells to most: weight management and GLP-1 programs that rely on a connected scale, and remote monitoring programs built on Withings blood pressure cuffs. Withings says its Enterprise API plan lifts the requirement for some uses [6], so clinical programs with a direct Withings relationship may be unaffected. Consumer apps that read from Apple Health or Health Connect have no such option.

What does EU law say?

Withings is a French company, and since 12 September 2025 the EU Data Act has given users of connected products specific rights over the data those products generate [7]. Three provisions matter here:

• Access is free to the user. Article 4(1) requires the data holder to make data available to the user “free of charge, in a comprehensive, structured, commonly used and machine-readable format” when the user cannot get it directly from the product [7].
• So is sharing with a third party the user chooses. Article 5(1) requires the data holder, at the user’s request, to make readily available data available to a third party “without undue delay”, “free of charge to the user”, and continuously and in real time where technically feasible [7].
• Gatekeepers are excluded. Article 5(3) says a company designated as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act “shall not be an eligible third party” [7]. Apple and Alphabet are designated gatekeepers [8].

Put together, the law draws a line that runs straight through Withings’ change:

So in the EU, the Data Act gives users no free right to have Withings sync into Apple Health or Health Connect. Charging a user to share their data with a non-gatekeeper app or assistant they have chosen is harder to square with Article 5(1). No regulator has ruled on this, Withings has not said whether the change applies differently in the EU, and the obligations depend on details such as what counts as readily available data. Other rules, such as the GDPR right to data portability, work differently and are outside this post. Treat this as the question to put to your counsel, not the answer.

The practical consequence is more interesting than the legal one. In the EU, an app does not have to wait for a user to buy Withings+. It can ask the user to request that Withings share their data with it directly, and Withings can recover reasonable costs from the app but not a fee from the user [7][9].

Is this a one-off?

It is the latest step in a direction the whole category is taking. Strava now charges developers and bars intermediaries [4]. Garmin has paused new developer applications [10]. Google is closing the Fitbit Web API on 30 October and charges consumers for the coach that interprets their data [11]. Withings has gone one step further: the user now pays to move their own data out.

The common thread is that data leaving a device maker’s app is being treated as a product rather than a default. Phone health stores looked like neutral pipes because the device makers chose to fill them for free. That choice is now being revisited one brand at a time, and every app that depends on a brand writing to Apple Health or Health Connect is exposed to the next revision.

How to detect the gap in your own data

Because nothing errors, you have to look for absence, per source. Both phone stores tell you where each value came from:

• Health Connect stamps every record with metadata.dataOrigin, the package name of the app that wrote it. The Withings app’s package is com.withings.wiscale2 [13]. Group weight, body fat and blood pressure records by that origin.
• HealthKit attaches an HKSourceRevision to every sample, naming the app that saved it. Group by the Withings app as source.

The pattern that identifies a Withings+ gap is specific: a user who said during onboarding that they use a Withings device, or who has Withings records from before, and who has no records from the Withings origin since. A user with old Withings data that stops abruptly is more likely disengaged or has changed devices; a user who joined recently, named a Withings scale and has never produced a single Withings record is the signature of this change. Our guide to deduplicating health data across wearables covers keeping the source with every value, which all of this depends on.

What should apps that use Withings data do?

1. Watch freshness by source. Run the check above daily. A new user who connected a Withings device and has sent nothing for a week is almost certainly missing Withings+, not disengaged.
2. Tell users before they hit the wall. If onboarding asks for a Withings device, say that new Withings accounts need Withings+ for data to reach other apps. One sentence at setup saves a support ticket later.
3. Test with a new account. Create a fresh Withings account and run your flow end to end. Old test accounts will hide the problem [1].
4. Do not make one brand your only source for a core metric. If weight drives your product, accept other scales and manual entry. If blood pressure does, accept other cuffs.
5. For clinical programs, talk to Withings. If Withings devices are part of a care pathway, the Enterprise API plan exists for exactly that, and Withings says it lifts the requirement for specific use cases [6].
6. In the EU, ask counsel about Article 5. A user-initiated request to share Withings data directly with your app is a route that does not depend on Withings+ at all [7].

Withings has made the most direct version of a move the industry has been making for two years: data that leaves the device maker’s app now has a price. In the US that is a commercial decision. In the EU it runs into a law that says sharing with a user’s chosen app must be free to the user, with a carve-out for Apple and Google. Either way, the safe assumption for any product is that no device brand’s data is guaranteed to arrive, and that you should know within days when it stops.