Today is the day of Google’s biggest change to Fitbit: it’s shutting down a few more features. As Google announced in February, Fitbit’s popular “Challenge”and “Adventure”fitness gamification features are shutting down today. Google is also getting rid of the “Open Group”social networking feature.
Some people find it difficult to get motivated to exercise, which is why the Fitbit software includes several ways to gamify fitness to try and keep people engaged. Challenges were introduced in 2014 as a way to share and compare steps with friends, which hopefully motivates both of you to exercise more. This feature included badges that could be earned for certain tasks and trophies for winning a battle. Adventures have been announcedin 2017 as location-specific challenges that highlighted local places suitable for sports and hiking, such as national parks and attractions. You can navigate these areas alone at your own pace, or participate in multiplayer “Adventure Races”where you can track your walking speed or progress against other Fitbit users. It looks like it will get better with Google Maps integration. Well.
Adventures, challenges, and all trophies and badges earned by players will disappear from today. The Fitbit community on Reddit was furious at the removal of features, with the most popular post over the past year calling for canceling a Fitbit Premium subscription due to the changes. On Twitter, Fitbit tried to celebrate the company’s birthday yesterday, but almost all of the responses were about turning the feature off and what other services people should switch to. Today, several users have confirmed that these features are dead.
Google announced the acquisition of Fitbit in 2019, and at the time she described the deal by saying, “We see an opportunity to further invest in Wear OS and also bring Made by Google wearables to market.”Google’s blog post made no mention of continuing to manufacture or support Fitbit’s existing products and services, and instead of some promise to overwhelm Fitbit with Google’s technology, the blog post sounded like Fitbit would be taken apart.
So far, we haven’t seen anything from Google to dissuade us from the initial impression that Fitbit will slowly die. Google has announced plans to shut down the Fitbit account system this year and transition existing users to Google Accounts. Google disabled Fitbit PC and Mac syncing last year, so it’s no longer possible to download music to wearables. Fitbit Studio, the browser-based SDK for developing Fitbit apps, closed on April 20 last month. Fitbit’s latest product launch, the Fitbit Sense 2 and Versa 4, resulted in significant performance degradation compared to older models. They were deprived of the Fitbit app store, Google Assistant (!), Wi-Fi support and music control.
The only non-disconnect action we’ve seen Google do with Fitbit is toss out the unfinished Fitbit app exclusively for the Pixel Watch. This Fitbit app is worse than the real Fitbit, and worse than the previous Google Fit app for Wear OS, before Google dropped advanced strength training options in 2020. The Pixel Watch also has Fitbit Premium, a $10/month subscription service. this includes some sleep tracking features and new statistics. Is this the future of Fitbit? Some kind of software? The app that will replace Google Fit? It’s still hard to say. Whatever Google’s plans for the future, we can’t imagine that removing all key social features from the existing community will bring it many loyal customers.