Fitbit users: You better beat your friends in challenges while you still can. Starting March 27, Fitbit will remove all open adventures, challenges, and groups from its app.
It’s a striking move. Before the Google acquisition in 2019 (and closure in 2021), Fitbit frequently touted its community and social features as a major strength. Its challenges (competitions between Fitbit users) have been a part of the Fitbit platform for over 10 years and have been copied by almost every other fitness tracking platform and smartwatch. adventure they were later introduced as a type of immersive challenge, where users could take virtual tours of places like Yosemite National Park while hitting step targets. Meanwhile, open groups are exactly what they sound like: groups that anyone can join around a common interest. Many have several hundred thousand or even millions of members.
However, after March 27, users will only be able to create private closed groups with friends. To connect with other users, they will have to do it on Fitbit’s Health and Wellness Forums. In the meantime, earned trophies will also not be available. Instead, members will need to interact with friends through leaderboard posts and community feeds in the app. Users will have until March 27 to download your data.
For developers, Fitbit is also removing fitbit studio in favor of its command line software development kit (SDK). Fitbit Studio was for developers who wanted to create watch faces, as well as third-party apps for the platform.
The move is allegedly part of a larger plan to better integrate Google’s technology. In an email to the edge, Fitbit said these features were of “limited use.” In the case of the SDK, it makes sense as Google has been pushing its WearOS 3 platform and third-party apps have been removed from Fitbit’s latest Versa 4 and Sense 2 smartwatches. However, if the community features were indeed “limited use,” that’s a worrying sign regarding Fitbit’s user base.
“Fitbit found that these select features had a limited number of active users compared to other offerings, but cannot confirm specific numbers at this time,” said Nicol Addison, Fitbit and Nest’s head of communications. the edge in an email.
Last week, the Fitbit app suffered a multi-day server outage that left users unable to sync their data. But while the timing of this news is curious, Addison says the decision to remove old Fitbit features “is not related to any recent server outages.”
