If you’re an Apple Watch user, you may soon have a choice to make. Just like Garmin, Polar, Oura and others, Apple will soon be adding new, shiny AI-powered features to its Health app – and in order to access them you’ll need to pay a monthly or annual fee.
The best Apple Watches and the Apple Health app have always been free to use after your initial watch purchase, with no further cost other than paying for LTE as part of your phone’s data plan.
This won’t change, according to noted Apple watcher Mark Gurman. In his Power On newsletter (via MacRumors) he says the new features will be in a new paid-for tier that will be accessible via the Health app on iPad and iPhone, rather than the Watch.
However, companies that sell hardware are different. Often, users feel as though they’re being nickel-and-dimed for premium subs, as even after ponying up for the product up front they have to pay in perpetuity in order to get the full experience. Even though many tech firms promise that everything that was free on the app when you bought it will remain free at the point of use, users can still feel as if they’re being short-changed.
Tech products that get constantly updated, such as Apple and Garmin watches, tend to deliver new features to your watch or app as long as the technology is supported, and that value is baked into the initial price. The best Garmin watches, for example, recently got the Lifestyle Logging feature as a free update, and users of the best iPhones get software updates that often include user interface redesigns every year.
The big worry for users is that when paywalls get introduced, new features slated to arrive on your device get dropped behind the paywall instead to encourage more people to subscribe. This lowers the value prospect of the product, as you buy the device expecting new features for several years, only to end up unable to access those features without forking out for the membership fee.
This year, Garmin introduced its Garmin Connect+ subscription, boasting updated Livetrack features, an Active Intelligence service which recommends actions and offers motivation based on your wellness data, and a new Performance dashboard to better organise your stats. Garmin users were concerned and angry, taking to comments sections, Reddit threads, and TechRadar’s inbox to voice their fury.
One user on our TikTok video about the subject wrote: “This is bad news. All new features from now on will be behind a paywall. And in few years, then the initial rage settles, they will move more and more features behind paywall like Strava did.”
Another emailed in to say: “My concern is that new content will go with the new premium paid service and our current content will be eroded to the point where you have no choice to switch either to a new / alternative provider, or to add the subscription.”
We ended up getting so much communication around this issue, we launched a live blog to cover it.
Garmin users are fiercely passionate about their watches, and love to get into the nitty-gritty of issues like data collection. Most of them saw Connect+ as a slap in the face – and if Apple isn’t careful, it may end up suffering a similar fate.
Apple Watch and iPhone users don’t tend to be as specialized as Garmin users, so an extra optional subscription fee may not draw the same sort of ire. But Apple already has a Fitness+ subscription service, and it sounds like rather than rolling the AI feature into this paywall, it’s setting up a separate Health+ service.
If Apple users begin to feel as though they’re being squeezed by this, even after already buying premium devices – after all, iPhones aren’t cheap – they’ll certainly make it known, and the backlash won’t be pretty for Apple.
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