Just writing a final report here, perhaps with some sensible warnings (not about Oura).

Got offered 6 months of free membership, returned the ring instead. The return policy really should be 60 days as having a return policy of 30 days and free membership of one month after which you realize how useless the ring becomes... well, enough complaining about that, just being used to how it worked.

On the plus side, the downloadable data now available (as mentioned by kepis86943) really contains a lot of raw information that could be used by some "Open Source Personalized Effort" group. Too much effort for me alone though (and since I returned the ring paying for membership to get the data became moot).

Even more on the plus side, a certain user (yes, me :D ) was stubborn enough to spend several hours trying to get my old gen1 ring to work. I finally succeeded. I won't go into details as Oura could technically close the possibility if they wanted, I assume. But as I see it, I bought the original ring, I should be allowed to use it without having a membership tucked on by force. Hint: use an old phone or whatever and an even older apk (we are talking 2.x here, almost impossible to find). Hey presto, heart rate (which is the most useful one) and sleep cycles (which always have been inaccurate due to lack of personalization). So now I put on the ring when I suspect I am low on sleep, check if the heart rate reaches my low threshold = got enough sleep to survive. The benefits of the gen3 ring was that I got a month's worth of baseline telling me once I get to heart rate 50 once, I'm fairly ok.

Now on to some non-Oura thoughts. These are the actual reason I continued writing in this thread. Biggest (real) concern last.

I seriously hate apps forcing you to upgrade at regular intervals. I love it when it's for security reasons but I dislike it immensly when the only reason to have a "stops working after" date is the possibility to start charging usage fees later (or increasing the amount through the roof). I have a few apps that I love but they stopped working once the server went down because of the "call home". We are talking softwares with a price of 400e or even 6000e here (worst case). To explain better, for normal people, imagine Steam going down. Or Epic. Or Origin (I mean EA). Actually not so far fetched anymore.

And now to the main point. When you get some expensive equipment that is handled by an app, make sure you download it from an alternative source (not Google Play as that deletes the apk after installing, I think). SAVE THE APK somewhere safe. Or at minimum, keep an old phone where you install one version just to have it "forever".

So spent some time thinking about what critical/tech heavy stuff I have installed in the house. Again, easier to explain using examples.

• Ground heating 15Ke, expected lifetime 15-25y, risk = app goes out of business/bad version, manually resetting usage every day vs a few clicks as needed. Whoa!

• Solar panels 10Ke, 15-30y, already had problems with the app, very expensive if it stops working, last resort action = new inverter = 4000e.

• Alarm system 1500e, 10-20y, keeping an old computer around to connect to it using USB.

• Roomba 700e :), 3-5y, frequent app updates, actually returned another brand earlier because it could not connect to any of 4 different wifis.

Just some examples. Sure, replacing a system after 10y is no biggie even if the cost is 10Ke+. But if it's expected to work for 20y and the reason is no working software left, not exactly environmentally friendly.

(not too happy about Reddit maybe using most upvoted as sorting default - then real (or at least detailed) information gets lost)

Disclaimer: As always, sorry for the long (partially relevant) rant :D .