Fitbit Plumbs New Depths Of Bottomless Suckiness After Google Acquisition

Shortly after the company’s $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit in 2019, Google Senior VP Rick Osterloh wrote a blog post proclaiming that the merger would result in better and cheaper fitness tracking tech:

“We’re confident the combination of Fitbit’s leading technology, product expertise and health and wellness innovation with the best of Google’s AI, software and hardware will drive more competition in wearables and make the next generation of devices better and more affordable.

Fitbit users don’t seem to agree.

Three years after the deal closed and users increasingly argue that Google’s acquisition has made Fitbit products worse. There have been constant complaints of quality control issues, and the elimination of a long list of functionality, including social features, the ability to sync with computers, and the browser-based SDK for developing apps. And what basic features remain are increasingly being hidden behind subscription paywalls.

Last week, Google announced that it was also shutting down the Fitbit web app, which included many features not available on the mobile app:

“Dumping the web app leaves a few holes in Fitbit’s ecosystem. The Fitbit app doesn’t support big screens like tablet devices, so this is removing the only large-format interface for data. Fitbit’s competitors all have big-screen interfaces. Garmin has a very similar website, and the Apple Watch has an iPad health app. This isn’t an improvement.”

Users at Reddit are…not pleased, listing a variety of the functionalities they’ll be losing as Google takes Fitbit app only. And Reddit is absolutely packed with similar threads about deteriorating quality.

As the Ars comment section notes, this is driving many users to Apple or to Garmin, which tends to offer more functionality and doesn’t bury features behind a subscription paywall. To hear Google tell it, they’re primarily focused on Fitbit as an app for its own watches, but despite promises of looming “AI” integration,” it’s not remotely clear that anything about the strategy is resulting in better product.

None of this really helps blunt the criticism of antitrust reformers that say large tech companies are increasingly interested less in innovation, and more in stock-bumping, tax-cut generating catch and kill acquisitions whose primary function is to slowly strangle anything deemed a competitive threat to the company’s current or future products.