When tech hardware becomes paperweights
Technology
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This something that really annoys me about more and more hardware sold these days. The incessant need to have a connected app and sign in. What I don’t understand is why businesses do it, it increases both the costs before and after a sale to make and maintain?
What I want is “noddy” hardware that does just what it is made to do.
Businesses like having an app on your phone because they can update it to fix bugs, add features, track your activity and send you notifications/ads when they have something new to sell.
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StopKillingBloodPressureMonitors?
StopKillingTech?
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The part that is growing is how many tools rely on apps and other connected features.
I have a blood pressure monitor, and it just outputs the result to a built-in screen. I can then log the values however I want, and it's probably easier and quicker to manually enter the three numbers each consisting of 2-3 digits into an app than to wait for the bluetooth connection to be established.
This battery monitor will never be remotely shutdown, because there is no remote function. And if the blood pressure tracking app shuts down, I can just use any other.
I have a CO² station that logs to a .csv on a fat32 formatted sdcard. Beat that.
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This something that really annoys me about more and more hardware sold these days. The incessant need to have a connected app and sign in. What I don’t understand is why businesses do it, it increases both the costs before and after a sale to make and maintain?
What I want is “noddy” hardware that does just what it is made to do.
Probably because businesses themselves want all their applications connected so one doing the administration is easier (and better) and there is more management information.
Then again, there are still a ton of bookkeepers and accountants (especially in the US) wasting your money on reconciling bank transactions more than once a year when the bank connector is foolproof
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I have a CO² station that logs to a .csv on a fat32 formatted sdcard. Beat that.
I made a physiotherapy game console for kids that logs physiotherapy executions to a .csv on a fat32 formatted sdcard
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I made a physiotherapy game console for kids that logs physiotherapy executions to a .csv on a fat32 formatted sdcard
Ok, let's call it a tie.
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Other than Garmin GPS I don't think I own any devices that require an app to function. Just don't buy this shit.
If you can. Medical devices are particularly nasty: there may be only one or two brands on the market that do what you need, because such devices understandably require extensive certification. If the only available option requires an app, you're stuck. If you need something that meets other legal or professional certification requirements, you might also have very limited options.
For just about anything else, I agree that there's probably some alternative to an app-locked device, although some level of convenience tradeoff may be necessary.
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Now I have this blood pressure monitor device that doesn't work without a logged in app and is a paperweight. I'm lucky I never invested into their ecosystem of health products. Lesson is no matter how popular a brand is, there is no guarantee they will be around. I've lost all my health data and there is no way to get it back.
The company is Qardio. The device is the QardioArm.
This exact thing happened to me yesterday. I woke up, tried to use the blood pressure monitor for the first time in months, and was signed out of my account in the app with no way to log back in because the server is now offline. I went to reddit and tried their suggestions, but nothing worked.
I looked for an open-source app that might be able to interface with the QardioArm, but no luck. It's just junk now. I can't even access my blood pressure history in the app. I knew this was a risk when I bought it, and I did get around 4 good years out of the product, but what a damn waste.
Make this illegal already.
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If you can. Medical devices are particularly nasty: there may be only one or two brands on the market that do what you need, because such devices understandably require extensive certification. If the only available option requires an app, you're stuck. If you need something that meets other legal or professional certification requirements, you might also have very limited options.
For just about anything else, I agree that there's probably some alternative to an app-locked device, although some level of convenience tradeoff may be necessary.
One company that I can recommend is Withings. They do have an companion app, but a lot of devices do work on their own, and when not, they work with Google Fit or HomeAssistant, though probably due to that fact the products are pricier.
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Now I have this blood pressure monitor device that doesn't work without a logged in app and is a paperweight. I'm lucky I never invested into their ecosystem of health products. Lesson is no matter how popular a brand is, there is no guarantee they will be around. I've lost all my health data and there is no way to get it back.
I've been slowly making my way into the smart home ecosystem and was incredibly concerned about these not because of paperweight necessarily but because of needing to send data to a company over the internet which might not be available when it's needed.
So I ended up going with Home Assistant and I'm really happy about the launch of the Works with Home Assistant program with the logo on devices.
