Google is killing most of Fitbits social features today

News Summary

  • Whatever Google's plans for the future are, we can't imagine that stripping all the key social features away from the existing community will earn it many repeat customers.
  • They were stripped of the Fitbit app store, Google Assistant, Wi-Fi support, and music controls.The only non-shutdown action we've seen Google do with Fitbit is rush a half-baked Fitbit app out the door exclusively for the Pixel Watch.
  • Google is also removing the "Open Group" social networking feature.Getting motivated to work out is tough for some people, so Fitbit's software included a few ways to gamify fitness to keep people interested.
  • The Fitbit community on Reddit has been furious over the feature removals, with the most popular post of the past year being a call to cancel your Fitbit Premium subscription over the changes.
  • That Fitbit app is both worse than a real Fitbit and worse than Wear OS' previous Google Fit app, before Google stripped out the advanced weight training options in 2020.
  • Google announced plans to shut down the Fitbit account system sometime this year and move existing users to Google accounts.
Enlarge/ Fitbits nowdead Challenges feature. 5 with Todays the day for Googles biggest change yet to Fitbit Its shutting down some more features. As Google announced in February, the popula [+3561 chars]