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Nokia Health Mate — Total health tracking: activity, heart rate, weight, sleep
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Chris Messina
Top Hunter
Hunter
Nokia's $191M acquisition of Withings is complete, and so the Withings Health Mate has been released with a new design and featureset. The reviews seem pretty negative so far though...
v3.0 release notes:
Welcome to Nokia Health Mate
Withings is now Nokia. Discover how your trusted health companion app has improved.
Simplified navigation
Everything you need is a tap away.
Personal coaching
Achieve your health goals with expanded wellness programs.
Family matters
Enjoy easy access to health profiles of the people you care about.
Mission control
Manage all your settings in one place.
Go Green
The new color scheme is your guide to better health.
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I've been using the Withings app for years because it was a good solid app in its own right. I'm glad now that I don't own any Withings hardware so I'm not forced to use this version.
I actually haven't found any issues yet while using my Body+ scale. However, it is sad that Nokia took a working product and broke it massively for others. I will say, once the app is working again, I'm glad that Nokia gave it a refresh. The old app was just weird UI design-wise, and I'm glad it's a little more modern!
Absolutely HORRIBLE. I have disabled auto-update on my phone JUST to avoid the app from changing over. I wish I could go back to the old desktop dashboard :(
As a long time Withing user, Nokia's revamp of the app has been horrible. It crashes repeatedly, doesn't consistently sync and they've messed up what was a somewhat decent ux. Not really a happy owner of their tech right now. I suggest looking elsewhere until they figure out what they are doing.
@anishnpa the problem is they replaced a fully functional app with a poorly functional one that's required to use for a relatively costly personal device. Also, this is a huge company buying a "loved" start-up. Nokia should and could do much better. We all love the cool things listed here on @producthunt from startups around the world. We should celebrate the cool and interesting and critique the lazy large companies that buy innovation and then mess it up.
@ajlawrence there's something positive here, I've heard them respond to feedback and work on emergency fixes
@anishnpa "something positive"? Do you have one of their devices? The updates since the initial ones have fixed the crashing but have further reduced their functionality and are missing larger amounts of user activity. Nokia is a $25 billion a year company. If we treat them to the same level of expectation as a true start up than we are asking to have subpar products. This site is about the celebration of new and unique efforts from any and all companies (though with a healthy expectation of these products coming from startups). Feel free to spend your money and apologize for large companies all you like, but Nokia released a poor product. I am calling them out on it as both an active member of this community and as "now" an owner of their product. They should have done better.
@anishnpa I have to agree with @ajlawrence here, and fundamentally I think you're missing one important aspect when you said "...let's give them some time, Withings wasn't perfect either when it launched" and this is that Nokia bought Withings in a state where they'd resolved the majority of issues. Nokia didn't acquire a start-up, they haven't just "launched" something - they acquired something that was working well for the majority of users, and then ... they broke it. They should have had a phased approach starting with just rebranding, rather than going fully balls out and redesigning the application functionality. It's a truly miserable experience, and is a classic example of how not to handle change management. This "big bang" approach rarely works well for a company, and Nokia has signposted with this how poorly they can do it.
I would definitely give a startup the benefit of the doubt, and indeed all the encouragement I could, but they're not a startup, they're a mature company, who acquired another mature company. I've spent a lot of money with Withings over the years, so I think it's not unreasonable of me, or any other customer, to expect that there'd be a level of support for the products from Nokia that was consistent level with that Withings provided at the time they were acquired by Nokia.
If I could downvote this app to oblivion, and send it to the depths of Tartarus, I would happily do so. Like @ajlawrence I've been a long time Withings user and fan. I've two Activite watches (the "original" $400 one and a new Steel HR) which I adore because of their simplicity, and the fact they don't try to do "everything", the Thermo, and the Pulse O2. I was just about to pull the trigger and get the scales as well, but this "update" to the Health Mate app that Nokia have issued is just utterly and completely horrendous and broken. Even after their latest update my Steel HR watch won't synchronise, even though they proudly proclaim in the app itself they've fixed the problem (uh....no, they haven't), I was having fun collecting all the location badges (now gone), and the UX of the app is confusing and inconsistent. I cannot in all faith recommend this system to anyone any more. Hopefully they'll improve it, but since I can track the square-root of nothing at the moment I'm going to have to switch to something else. It's pretty sad - Nokia used to be an amazing company, as were Withings, and you could count on any new releases from either company being stable, and usable to the most extent, but the two together seem to have halved their abilities, rather than doubled. I seriously can't see how any of the problems with the Steel HR made it past QAT - I can only assume they didn't bother or it would have been obvious, and if they put the app redesign through a focus group of any sort I'm pretty sure they ignored the feedback.
Overall - disappointing and frustrating :-(
Like others, I had issues with my Steel HR syncing my information when I updated to the new app. It's since been fixed, so there's that. Unfortunately, I just noticed that while my app is showing all my HR info, the web version stopped updating the info the same time of the new app rollout.
Also, there's still no sign of editing sleep tracking data (if I get up and just move to the couch, awake but a bum, it tends to recognize that as all sleep). This was a basic feature when I had a Fitbit, so it would be nice to have.
I do like the new design, but I wish the implementation had been better handled.