Google’s abuse of Fitbit continues with web app shutdown

Google’s continued abuse of the Fitbit brand is continuing with the shutdown of the web dashboard. Fitbit.com used to be both a storefront and a way for users to get a big-screen UI to sift through reams of fitness data. The store closed up shop in April, and now the web dashboard is dying in July.

In a post on the “Fitbit Community” forums, the company said: “Next month, we’re consolidating the Fitbit.com dashboard into the Fitbit app. The web browser will no longer offer access to the Fitbit.com dashboard after July 8, 2024.” That’s it. There’s no replacement or new fitness thing Google is more interested in; web functionality is just being removed. Google, we’ll remind you, used to be a web company. Now it’s a phone app or nothing. Google did the same thing to its Google Fit product in 2019, killing off the more powerful website in favor of an app focus.

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. To make matters worse, the app does not have the features of the web dashboard, with many of the livid comments in the forums on Reddit calling out the app’s deficiencies in graphing, achievement statistics, calorie counting, and logs.

Google bought Fitbit back in 2021 and has spent most of its time shutting down Fitbit features and making the products worse. Migrations to Google Accounts started in 2022. The Google Assistant was removed from Fitbit’s 2022 product line, the Sense 2 and Versa 4, when support existed on the previous models. Social features—a key part of fitness motivation for many—were killed off in 2023. Google has mostly focused on making Fitbit an app for the Pixel Watch.