Jimmy Westenberg / Android Authority
TL;DR
- WHOOP fitness trackers require a mandatory subscription to use, starting at $199 a year.
- A new open source app called Goose attempts to access WHOOP tracker data without requiring a subscription at all.
- Right now, Goose is more a proof of concept than anything, but shows that there’s potential for subscription alternatives.
Who among us doesn’t feel a little resentful about all the subscriptions we regularly pay for to access the products and services we crave? Sometimes, a subscription makes unambiguous sense — maybe you really appreciate the convenience of meal prep kits. But all too often, it can feel like this payment model is little more than a way to squeeze more money out of us. Just days ago, we took a look at how Oura Ring users were building a subscription-free way to access their health data, and now we’re learning about a similar project for another wearable.
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This time, we’re not talking about smart rings, but screenless fitness trackers — and no, not the new Fitbit Air. Instead, we’re looking at WHOOP, a product built from the ground up with the idea that its usage is tied to a subscription. At least, that’s what WHOOP wants you to do, but now a new open source project called Goose attempts to see what’s possible to do with the wearable without needing a subscription at all.
Developer Bennet shares news of their project over on X, and they caution that this is a quickly thrown together, incredibly early pre-alpha build that’s in no way meant as a replacement for a WHOOP subscription in its current form. But it does work in rudimentary fashion, and is able to successfully pull and display data from the wearable.
If this is to get anywhere approaching an actual realistic alternative to a WHOOP subscription, a whole lot of work needs to happen, from a bunch of optimizing the code to reduce the currently substantial lag, to porting the project over to Android — right now it’s targeting iOS devices. There’s also no support for older hardware, and the app only works with the latest WHOOP 5.0 model.
While those are a whole lot of asterisks that definitely impact the usefulness of this news, it’s still very exciting progress to see, especially considering just how fast this early version was cooked up. Considering that WHOOP subscriptions start at $199 a year and only go up from there, we imagine that a whole lot of users might be at the very least curious about a no-recurring-cost alternative.
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