Withings Health Mate fails to sync or log in – IPv6 Hall of Shame

     

The Withings Health Mate app stopped working on my iPhone. First it was just stuck on a

Loading…

message, and new scale measurements stopped popping up. Then I logged out, and tried to log back in. Then it presented me with an utterly useless

Something went wrong. Timeout

message. After a bunch of hooks I figured it’s because of IPv6 enabled on my Eero router. If I disabled IPv6, Health Mate worked immediately. Here’s the twist: apps may try to go through IPv6 if you a) explicitly tell them to not use IPv4 b) the address they’re sent to has AAAA (=IPv6) DNS records set. So my guess is that the guys at Withings set up the corresponding AAAA records up for at least some of their web addresses, but “forgot” to make all their web addresses actually listen on IPv6. Which, if true, just blows my mind.

TLDR: disable Wi-Fi on your phone while using Health Mate, or disable IPv6 either on your router or your phone (only possible on Android), and Health Mate will work. Yes, it’s stupid to be required to disable IPv6 in 2022, but that’s how it is. Also make sure to bug Withings about the issue, because it’s ridiculous.


In any case, I became curious and disabled IPv4 altogether on one of my Windows 11 rigs. Here’s a non-comprehensive list of things that don’t work if you’re on an IPv6-only connection.

Hopefully someday I can rename this post to “Hall of Fame”, when all the items are in working condition, but after all these years we’ve had IPv6 with us, I have no idea how much longer it’ll take. We live in the year 2022, and most of the websites, apps and Windows components just don’t work without IPv4. Not even on Windows 11, with all the latest updates applied.

It’s puzzling, to say the least. I’m writing this post, right now, from my IPv6-only Windows PC. All I did was set up the AAAA record for my site, and told my web server to listen on its assigned IPv6 address. It’s not rocket surgery, so dear service providers and app developers, be good and fix this mess already!

Windows Apps

App Status Remarks
FileZilla must put IPv6 addresses inside brackets
Mail
Messenger messages and updates work, but images fail to load
Microsoft Edge won’t sync, the new tab page won’t load, IPv6 web pages work
Microsoft OneDrive
Microsoft Store
Microsoft To Do updates itself, but won’t log in
Ookla Speedtest
PuTTY
qBittorrent update checker points you to IPv4-only page
Telegram
Unigram
Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 it worked in WSL 1
Windows Update

Sites

Site Status
amazon.com
bmwblog.com
cleantechnica.com
cloudflare.com
disqus.com
facebook.com
github.com
google.com
inoreader.com
insideevs.com
instagram.com
linkedin.com
live.com (Outlook Mail)
microsoft.com
microsoftonline.com (Office 365)
neowin.net
noobient.com
paypal.com
protonmail.com
reddit.com
techspot.com
twitter.com
withings.com
youtube.com