Google, Please Don’t Kill Fitbit (Premium)

Last week, Google confirmed that it has stopped selling Fitbit trackers in dozens of countries around the world. Its rationale for this scaling back—“to align [its] hardware portfolio to map closer to Pixel’s regional availability,” is of course suspect. So all the Fitbit fan can do now is wonder, worry, and wait.

Since that’s my default posture, I’m in familiar territory here. But Fitbit’s decision, whatever the real reason, comes at an interesting time: My wife and I are both long-time Fitbit users and we both coincidentally upgraded to new Fitbits, my wife with a Versa 4 smartwatch and me with the Google Pixel Watch 2.

Neither one of us really needed or even wanted to upgrade.

My wife had been using a three-year-old Versa 2 smartwatch, which never had any serious issues beyond the usual Fitbit nonsense, like its inability to switch time zones and its poor sleep tracking. But we were flipping the mattress on our bed in Mexico City last month and her Versa 2’s display just popped off like the glue holding it on had disappeared. And it stopped working.

In my case, I received a free Pixel Watch 2 because I preordered the Pixel 8 Pro smartphone on the day both products were announced. I had been using a Fitbit Charge 5 since I left the Apple Watch and tested the original Pixel Watch this Spring. And I was happy to remain with the Charge 5, honestly: It does exactly what I want, and nothing more, and its battery lasts for 6 days.

Anyway. We both upgraded.

My wife had previously left her weird, large Versa 2 charger behind on a previous trip to Mexico, so we have some experience with Fitbit availability in one of the countries that Google just pulled Fitbit out of. Which is to say, there wasn’t any. We searched high and low, in department stores, electronics stores, and malls, and while you could sometimes find a random Fitbit device, we never once found any Fitbit accessories, not the charger my wife needed or anything else. If there was any place to find Fitbit gear in Mexico, it was Mexico City, with its metro area population north of 20 million people. But it was like Fitbit didn’t exist in Mexico. And now, I guess it officially does not.

After losing out on her fitness data for two or three weeks, my wife never forgot her charger again. (Being compulsive, I always have two chargers, one for home and one in my travel bag. This information was not helpful to my wife.) But with her Versa 2 display beheaded from the device, we were in new territory. We already knew that Fitbit had no presence in this country. Now what?

Well, thank the magic of Amazon.com, which in Mexico City is just as good as its American counterpart, with next-day or two-day delivery of most items. So my wife researched the latest Fitbits and the Pixel Watch 2, the latter of which she quickly took out of the running because of its sub-one-day battery life. She does prefer the smartwatch form factor, however, so after comparing the similar Fitbit Sense 2 and Versa 4, she chose the latter. Perhaps tellingly, it was not available from Amazon Mexico, but no problem: Amazon shipped it to her from the United States. It arrived in two days.

The Versa 4 was an interesting upgrade. My wife fortunately missed out on the usability nightmare that was the capacitive side button on the Versa 3, as Fitbit/Google went back to a superior physical button with Versa 4. The device itself is thinner and lighter than her Versa 2, and it has new (to her) features like GPS. Unfortunately, her bulky old charger doesn’t work with the Versa 4, though I think the smaller new charger is a benefit too. In the end, it seemed to work out: She got three years of daily use out of her previous smartwatch. That’s not bad, especially given the cost. And she would have used it for longer if possible.

I’m in a different position given what I do for a living, and I test a lot of different devices, as noted above. But that doesn’t mean I don’t value things that just work and use them over long periods of time. My Fitbit Charge 5 is over two years old right now, it works fine, and, as noted, I like its combination of functionality and battery life. I have come back to it after using other devices, and I may still do so when my Pixel Watch 2 experiment concludes.

In any event, my wife and I both received real value from devices that were inexpensive to acquire—especially compared to “real” smartwatches like the Apple Watch and Pixel Watch—delivered good levels of functionality, and terrific battery life, and would/did last for years. This is important, especially if what Google is really doing is scaling back its non-Pixel watch and tracker efforts: Let’s not be so quick to throw out the past just because it’s not a full-featured apps platform like Wear OS. Such a thing isn’t always needed and, as importantly, is sometimes a negative.

Put another way, my wife and I have both considered—and, in my case, used—modern, full-featured smart watches and have found them to be too much in terms of functionality and too little in terms of battery life. Fitbit’s trackers and smartwatches, the latter of which might now be considered low-end entries compared to Fitbit, are more tuned to our needs and sensibilities.

Consider my wife and her Versa 2/4. She likes the big screen, but from a functionality perspective, she’s looking for health and fitness tracking and a very short list of additional features, mostly the ability to see phone notifications and see and respond to text messages without having to pull her enormous Samsung Galaxy out of her bag. Most of the Android helper-type apps you could get on Wear OS are of no interest to her. But again, those six days of battery life are very much of interest.

As a more technical person, you may assume that I would gravitate to a powerful and feature-rich smartwatch, and I did of course use an Apple Watch Series 8 for several months. But I found myself rarely using its more complex features and sticking with the basics, which, like my wife, are mostly about health and fitness tracking. And while I did adapt to the daily need to charge the thing, I missed the six-day battery life I got with Fitbit.

When I look at the Google/Fitbit lineup today, I see a pretty good mix of products, with a variety of trackers at the low end, two Fitbit smartwatches (the Versa 4 and Sense 2) in the middle, and then the Pixel Watch 2 at the apex. But this mix has some interesting holes. The Wear OS used by the Pixel Watch is full-featured and powerful, and I find it easier/more logical than Watch OS on the Apple Watch. But it’s still a lot: When I configured my Pixel Watch 2, I removed preinstalled or recommended apps, but I didn’t actually add or install any. The battery life issue is obvious. And then there are those two Fitbit smartwatches.

Neither has been updated in over a year. And given Google’s new push with Pixel Watch and its enhanced Fitbit features, Wear OS 4, and the news that the underlying hardware platform will soon switch to the more efficient RISC-V, the signs are aligning. Is Google ready to kill off Fitbit-branded smart watches and move fully to Wear OS?

I hope not. But Google, like Microsoft, is a small-time, boutique-style hardware maker that won’t simply retain the status quo because it benefits a few users. It has platform ambitions here, and just thinking about the hardware space, even I have a hard time rationalizing keeping a weird tweener product line around, especially one that is less expensive than the flagship and gets 6 times the battery life. If anything, these products simply call attention to Pixel Watch’s—and Wear OS’s—shortcomings.

Of course, it’s also possible that such a repositioning, as I’ll call it, might benefit Fitbit’s trackers, too. Fitbit brought color displays to some of its trackers before Google stepped in, and that’s one of the things I really like about my Charge 5. And in the same way that the Pixel Watch 2 offers a more complete Fitbit experience than the original, Google has started bringing some Google services to some Fitbit devices. For example, my wife’s Versa 4 has Google Maps, Google Wallet, Phone, and Calendar integration (I’m not sure I’d call them “apps” since they rely on a nearby phone) and the recently-announced Charge 6 is the first Fitbit tracker to integrate with Google services (like Maps, Wallet, and YouTube Music). So maybe we’re on the cusp of a virtuous cycle.

Maybe. But I still worry that Google’s Apple envy, and its need to offer something like everything that Apple offers, will blind it to a part of the market that I feel is important, big, and underserved. And that by abandoning simpler smartwatches, it will simply cede that market to the faceless Chinese companies that sell look-alike crap on Amazon.

Fitbit deserves better. But so do its customers.