If you Apple Watch user, you may soon have to make a choice. Just like GarminPolar, Oura and others, Apple is soon adding shiny new AI-powered features to its Health app—and you'll have to pay a monthly or annual fee to access them.
best apple watches and the Apple Health app has always been free to use after the initial purchase of the Watch, at no additional cost other than paying for LTE as part of your phone's data plan.
According to renowned Apple commentator Mark Gurman, the situation will not change. In its newsletter, Power On (via McRumors) he says the new features will be in a new paid tier that will be available through the Health app on iPad and iPhone, rather than through the Watch.
However, the companies selling the equipment are different. Often, users feel like they are being paid pennies for premium subscriptions because even after they have paid for the product upfront, they have to pay forever to get all the features. Even though many tech companies promise that whatever is free in an app when you buy it will remain free when you use it, users can still feel like they've been cheated.
Tech products that are constantly updated, such as Apple and Garmin watches, tend to add new features to your watch or app while the technology is supported, and that value is built into the initial price. best Garmin watchesfor example, recently received a free update to the Lifestyle Journal feature, and users best iPhones Receive software updates, which often include UI design changes, every year.
A big concern for users is that with the introduction of a paywall, new features that are supposed to come to your device are instead kept behind a paywall to encourage more people to sign up. This reduces the long-term value of the product because you buy a device expecting new features to appear for several years, but ultimately cannot access those features without paying a membership fee.
This year, Garmin introduced the Garmin Connect+ subscription, which boasts updated Livetrack features, an Active Intelligence service that recommends actions and offers motivation based on how you're feeling, and a new Performance dashboard to better organize your stats. Garmin users were concerned and angry, and expressed their fury in comment sections, Reddit threads, and the TechRadar inbox.
One user on our Tik Tok video on this occasion he wrote: “This is bad news. From now on, all new features will be behind a paywall. And in a few years, when the initial anger subsides, they will move more and more features behind a paywall, just like Strava did.”
Another emailed: “My concern is that new content will come with a new paid premium service and our current content will be ruined to the point where you won't have the choice to switch to a new/alternative provider or add a subscription.”
We ended up getting so much communication on this issue that started a live blog to cover this.
Garmin users are very passionate about their watches and love to get into the nitty-gritty of things like data collection. Most of them took Connect+ as a slap in the face—and if Apple isn't careful, it could suffer the same fate.
Apple Watch and iPhone users tend to not be as specialized as Garmin users, so paying extra for a subscription may not draw the same ire. But Apple already has a Fitness+ subscription service, and it looks like instead of building an AI feature into that paywall, it's installing separate Health+ service.
If Apple users start to feel like they're being discriminated against, even after they've already bought premium devices (iPhones aren't cheap, after all), they're bound to speak up, and the backlash won't be pleasant for Apple.
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The best Apple Watch for any budget.
