Any word on how necessary the app is? Not really comfortable with the direction this technology is going when it has to be paired with an app, with your data sent to who know who.
See recent work on Sony WF-1000XM4 [1] as an example.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/issues/2925
I extremely agree. The fact that most people have phones nowdays is exploited without limits - what if someone just doesn't want to have a phone? Suddenly, a large amount of things are just unavailable for them. And that is considered okay because "nobody is forcing you to have all those things".
At least if having a phone was made mandatory by the government, the public could demand some kind of standards of privacy and security. This way, it's the worst of both worlds - phones are de-facto mandatory, but they're not officially mandatory, so phone manufacturers can do whatever they want because "nobody is forcing you to have a phone"... And all the other manufacturers can require you to have a phone because "everyone has a phone, duh".
Even worse is that the app appears to only be distributed on either the Apple or Google store - thus requiring an account with a third party.