Fitbit Sense 2
The future of Fitbit has been subtly, and not so subtly, revealed in recent days.
Following the launch of the Pixel Watch 3, Google announced this was the future of Fitbit smartwatches — not a Fitbit watch at all.
The Pixel Watch 3 is a WearOS watch, one you can expect to last a day or so off a charge, rather than the better part of a week like the Fitbit Sense 2.
Google haș since released a statement on the matter, following a slew of reports that read a little like a Fitbit eulogy. The message: Fitbit isn’t gone yet. But Google has not outwardly denied the company’s higher-end Fitbit watches will cease to exist in the future.
“We are very committed to Fitbit, and even more importantly to the customers that use and depend on those products and technology,” says Google.
“It’s also worth noting that many of the health and fitness features we launched in Pixel Watch 3 were because of Fitbit’s innovation and ground-breaking fitness advancements. In addition, we just launched Fitbit Ace LTE, and you’ll continue to see new products and innovation from Fitbit.”
It seems fairly safe to conclude the Fitbit Sense and Versa lines are most likely done for, or at least won’t get an upgrade in the mold seen to date.
This should not be a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the direction of Fitbit in recent years.
The Sense 2 and Versa 4 were announced in 2022, and were conservative upgrades that actually diluted the series’s smartwatch abilities in some senses. They nixed the Spotify app support that had been a mainstay of Fitbit’s higher-end watches, and have gradually been stripping out other elements like third-party app support and in-app challenges and virtual adventures.
Google Maps directions were added, but these came to the Fitbit Charge 6 too — a fitness tracker rather than a smartwatch.
Is it such a bad thing if Fibit becomes a fitness tracker company, just like it was in the old days? Perhaps not, but that former version of Fitbit also had a sense of fun Google has shown no intention to indulge in its made-for-adults trackers.
Fitbit’s future may instead lie in the direction of AI. In March 2024, Google’s The Check Up event heralded plans to use LLMs (large language models) to bring greater health insights to the Fitbit platform. This is also something Google can likely place behind a Fitbit Premium paywall.
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