Since the acquisition closed in 2021, the Googlefication of Fitbit has largely involved a reduction in features and a focus by Google on attracting people to the Fitbit app. Long-time users have flocked to Fitbit (sometimes at Fitbit’s request) to share hundreds of complaints about the recent changes. However, Google has been largely unresponsive to customer feedback.
Web app outage angers users
In June, Google announced that it was discontinuing the Fitbit.com online dashboard. Starting July 8, users looking for features similar to those offered by the web app will have to download the Fitbit mobile app. On the Fitbit Community forum, a company representative confirmed that users’ “activity, nutrition, sleep, and weight details and logs” would still be available through the app. However, the change inconvenienced users who preferred or needed to access such data on a larger screen than a phone. Worse, the app lacks some of the online dashboard’s features, such as food logging.
Despite these obvious inconveniences for users, the need to search for Fitbit on Google seemed to drive the change. Announcing the news on the community forum, a representative for Fitbit said:
Add to Google’s decades of being the best at interpreting data, and it’s our mission to be a combined team of Fitbit and Google. Consolidating the Fitbit.com dashboard into the Fitbit app is part of that mission and will allow us to focus on features that provide even more valuable insights to our users.
Google has invested in the Fitbit app, including plans to soon let premium subscribers try out Fitbit’s experimental generative AI features. Google is also developing a great language model for new Fitbit app features that are being forced on users. Google has been pushing users to use the Fitbit app for a while; in 2022, Fitbit devices lost the ability to sync with computers.
It’s worth mentioning that users unhappy with Fitbit are more likely to complain online. However, it’s notable that Fitbit’s announcement has received 1,523 responses (at the time of writing), mostly negative, with new responses still coming in. Another thread on the Fitbit forum requesting to keep the web dashboard currently has 601 upvotes. You can also find outraged users on Reddit.
The most common complaints have to do with the loss of features that were previously available.
“Change is good. Removing key features is not,” community member Seymourh86 wrote in June. “Unless you want people to leave for a competitor…”
Comments this week show that users are not happy with the change. DebL555, for example, said today that they are “very disappointed and frustrated that I can’t access my Dashboard from my PC.” Yesterday, NessWeb called the change “an incredibly bad decision,” adding:
It’s especially awful for anyone with visual impairments or finger dexterity issues. It’s still bad for everyone else because you can’t see as much on a 3″ screen as you can on a real computer…
Bring back the web interface!!!
As has happened every time there have been issues with Fitbit following its acquisition, theories are proliferating that Google is making the situation worse to push people towards the Pixel Watch. Others on the community forum were upset because they felt Google was ignoring feedback from long-time Fitbit customers.
In June, a user named jessicabilasano wrote:
I just hope Fitbit doesn’t end up like every other Google purchase that turns into a nightmare product or company. Google, instead of removing things that users love about Fitbit’s features, why don’t you improve them? Listen to your customers/consumers.
However, failure to respond to negative public feedback has become common for the Fitbit brand lately.