Third-Party Apps Let You Use a Whoop Band Without a Subscription

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I generally love my Whoop band, but there’s no question that the company’s subscription-only model isn’t for everyone. A few weeks ago, a hobbyist created an app that can connect to your old Whoop 4.0 strap. I loved the idea, since an independent app sounds like a great way to keep your data private and to make use of an otherwise obsolete piece of hardware. But as I worked through the steps of compiling and testing the freshly posted code, I noticed more apps like it popping up on Reddit and Github.

Since then, some of these Whoop-compatible apps have been taken down, at least one of those at the request of a Whoop executive. Here is what I learned in talking to several of those apps’ developers, and whether I think independent Whoop apps have a future. (Tentatively: yes.)

“In cases that violate our IP, trademarks, or terms of use, we have reached out to individuals to take down their apps,” a Whoop spokesperson said in a statement. The developers I’ve spoken to, for their part, believe that what they’re doing is legal and ethical.

Whoop’s position is that the value of the Whoop platform is in its proprietary analysis and features, which others have tried to imitate but cannot directly replicate. The company makes an API available to developers, through which they can access the data Whoop has processed. Using the API requires working through Whoop’s system — meaning the user must have a Whoop membership and allow the company to process their data. This is a different scenario than what’s going on with the independent projects described here. These new projects aim to let individuals use Whoop hardware without any contact with the company itself, and without ever having had a subscription.

Before getting into why the independent projects are worth watching, here is Whoop’s full statement:

“WHOOP is always excited to see how passionate our members are about using data to better understand their health and performance. WHOOP is designed as an integrated hardware, software, and data platform. It is not possible to access WHOOP proprietary health insights, coaching, analytics, or signature metrics and features — including Recovery, Strain, Sleep scoring, Stress Monitor, Healthspan, and WHOOP Coach — outside of the WHOOP membership experience. The value of WHOOP comes from turning continuous physiological data into validated, personalized, and actionable insights.

“We support third-party app development with our developer APIs and have even created an easy-to-use developer platform. However, not all third-party apps or independent tools are created, reviewed, or authorized by WHOOP.”

The Promise of Independent Whoop Apps

Whoop has always been a high-end product. It’s a screenless fitness tracker, now in its fifth generation, that you wear as a wristband. It captures your heart rate and motion data and sends that to an app on your phone, which in turn sends it to the cloud to be processed. You pay for this service — $239/year is the typical price — and in turn Whoop gives you detailed analysis of how well you’re recovering from your exercise.

Whoop’s app is good; it goes well beyond basic tracking, and it’s still worth the money if you’re a devoted athlete or you really like to nerd out about how well your body is handling the stress you put it under.

But for as long as Whoop has been around, there have been people wondering if they could use the device for their own purposes. While we finally have competing devices with no required subscription (like the Fitbit Air), there are also a lot of old Whoop devices out in the world. Nearly everyone who had a Whoop 4.0 has probably since upgraded to the 5.0 — the company sends out the newer version for free — leaving their old strap as e-waste. Independent apps offer a way to repurpose that old hardware.

That’s the idea behind apps like Noop, Goose, Wearable, and more. These newer apps aren’t the only ones compatible with Whoop hardware, but they appeared recently and quickly overtook several older, long-simmering projects working on the same question: How can an independent app read data from a Whoop device? If a free app can read the device’s data over Bluetooth, you could use the hardware for your own purposes without the Whoop app or subscription service.

How a Non-Whoop App Can Talk to a Whoop Band (and Why It’s Taken So Long)

The idea of an independent app for a Whoop band isn’t new. Several projects have tried it over the years with varying levels of success. One useful example was called Whoomp: you load a special web page in your browser, and your computer begins reading data from the Whoop band directly over Bluetooth — no subscription or Whoop account required. Projects like these demonstrate that the hardware itself is capable of transmitting raw data independently of Whoop’s platform, which is the foundation on which newer apps like Noop and Goose are built.