Rather than pay a monthly subscription for an app that plenty of people think kinda sucks, a developer has created Cracked Oura, an open source app that lets Oura ring wearers query and analyze their health data without the monthly fee.\u00a0On Thursday, Oura announced the new Ring 5, a lighter and smaller wearable with an allegedly better battery life. That ring will cost at least $399, and some models cost as much as $499. An Oura subscription, which is required to actually get usable insights on your sleep, stress, and exercise, costs nearly $70 a year or $6 a month.Or, users could try Cracked Oura, which developer Elmo Ahorinta published on GitHub earlier this year. \u201cPay for the ring, not for the app that is not even that good,\u201d its GitHub page reads.\ud83d\udca1Do you know anything else about Oura? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.The page says Cracked Oura keeps the health data local to a user\u2019s device, provides some deeper insights than the official app, and, most importantly, doesn\u2019t require a subscription. The app works by using Oura\u2019s data export function on its website. \u201c\u200b\u200bAnyone can request the data from their website and it comes with a bunch of CSVs that contain the data. My application just takes the CSVs and populates a database,\u201d Ahorinta told me in an email. Rather than having to log in to Oura\u2019s website and manually download their data each time, Cracked Oura does it automatically, Ahorinta said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not complete, though. \u201cAt the moment, my application misses some features that Oura has. For example, women’s health, symptom radar, and the front page’s short texts about sleep and readiness are features that would need reverse engineering,\u201d Ahorinta said. \u201cAlso, features like recording your workout heart rate and adding tags requires the subscription. But other than that, my application can be used to visualize the same data points that Oura does.\u201dThe GitHub page lists Claude as a contributor, indicating Ahorinta used AI to make the app.Even if not that many people end up using Cracked Oura, its existence highlights that people don\u2019t necessarily want to be locked into a single platform, or a monthly subscription fee, when they\u2019ve already spent a bunch of money to generate data about their own health. \u201cI hope that other people would also contribute to this project and fix my bugs and bad design choices that I have made. I believe that this type of workaround applications could be made for any other wearable devices that have a subscription that gatekeep some parts of the data,\u201d Ahorinta said.Oura did not respond to a request for comment.The company recently told cybersecurity journalist Zack Whittaker that it does \u201creceive infrequent requests from the government\u201d for user data. Oura wouldn\u2019t say how many requests it receives, how often it turns over that requested data, or what kinds of data is requested, Whittaker wrote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"