If you own a CMF Watch and haven’t opened Nothing X yet, your watch can’t pair with your phone anymore: the CMF Watch app stopped working on Sunday. The cutover landed on 19 July and it wasn’t a soft deprecation. Nothing pulled the app from both stores back on 3 April, gave everyone three months of warning, then flipped the switch.

The fitness record survives, and Nothing handled that part properly. Workout history, daily activity, sleep, heart rate, blood oxygen, stress and fitness goals all cross over, along with active score and training load if you’re on a Watch Pro 2. Open Nothing X, sign in with the same account, connect the watch, hit Data Migration.

It’s the leftovers that bother me. Nickname, avatar, height and weight need re-entering, which is a two minute annoyance. Custom watch faces built in the old app don’t come across at all, so whatever you designed is gone. And female health data doesn’t migrate. That’s the most sensitive category in the whole dataset and the one nobody can reconstruct from memory, and Nothing’s migration notice lists it in the same breath as your avatar.

The other thing worth knowing before you tap the button is that there’s no way back. Starting the migration deactivates your CMF Watch account permanently. No logging in again, no re-downloading the old app, no undo if the transfer goes sideways.

Which matters more than usual, because CMF isn’t really Nothing anymore. Nothing spun the sub-brand out into a standalone company in September 2025, based in India, running its own roadmap. So the state of play this week is that a separate company’s watch owners have been walked into an app owned by the parent that let them go, on a deadline the parent set. CMF launched in September 2023 with earbuds and a smartwatch and grew fast enough that the first CMF phone moved 100,000 units in three hours. That’s not a rounding error of a user base being asked to move.

I’d have fewer reservations if the receiving app had a clean record. When watch support first landed in July 2025 the forum filled with battery drain reports, and Nothing confirmed it as a known issue with a fix rolling out. People were still posting 15 to 20 percent overnight drain on Nothing OS 4.0 in December. The migration assistant itself was flaky during the beta: some users got no prompt at all, others watched every setting reset and rebuilt the watch from scratch. The advice going around Nothing’s own community back then was to wait until the app stabilised before migrating. On 19 July that stopped being an option.

Credit where it’s due, the runway was long. Nothing announced the merge in June 2025, shipped watch support the month after, delisted the old app in April and set the hard date three months later. Thirteen months of notice is more than most companies bother with, and the consolidation logic is sound for a company shipping across seven million devices under both brands. I just think “we told you a year ago” stops being a complete answer the moment the migration is irreversible and quietly lossy.

I’m leaving the Ear (3a) and its paid transcription tier out of this, that’s a separate post and a separate argument.

What I want to know now is how many people missed the date. Nothing has never published migration completion numbers, and the failure mode here is quiet: your watch keeps telling the time, it just stops talking to anything. If you’re sitting on a CMF Watch that hasn’t seen the app in a while, check tonight rather than next week. And if you already migrated and your period tracking history isn’t there, no, you didn’t do it wrong.

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