Fitbit will lay off 110 employees amid challenges in wearable market
theverge.com
theverge.com
Their warranty only lasts one year, yet I've had to replace both Fitbit devices I've had twice within that one year. I'm now Fitbit-less because the latest, a Charge HR, failed for the third time, and it's out of that one year warranty.
To give you an idea of how bad the Charge HR is, its charging plug attaches with metal prongs, but it plugs into a slim plastic housing that is only glued to the rest of the device. The obvious result is that the plastic housing eventually gets pulled off with the plug. That's how two of my three Charge HRs have died. It'd be like if your laptop were ruined within four months because the power cable pulled off an essential piece of the laptop housing rather than detaching cleanly, and now it won't attach in order to charge. The third Charge HR bricked itself during an unprompted firmware update, which started randomly and then I guess got interrupted midway through when I moved my phone too far from the device. It never recovered.
I don't know what the hell they're optimizing for over at Fitbit HQ, but they're trying to sell $10 throw-away quality devices for >$100. It's outrageous. I actively discourage everyone I know from ever buying anything from them, and many other people I know have also completely sworn them off for the same reason. Their product just sucks.
Based on these experiences, I wholeheartedly agree that their hardware just doesn't last very long and is why I switched to an Apple Watch (just got one a couple weeks ago!)
Spoke to another parent at school and he had at least a couple of these fail "because of humidity" IIRC.
My MS Band 1 lasted ~8 months before it suddenly died. MS replaced it. I then borrowed a friend's Band2 which had already been replaced 4 times. It died twice for me. MS replaced it once, then issued a refund check when they ran out of stock.
And then there is the Moto360 sport I had that went into an endless bootloop after ~9 months.
My wife's ChargeHR had a physical failure of the band after 9mo, and the same exact issue happened again last week.
I now have a Polar M600 and my wife has a Samsung Gear Fit2. Hopefully at least one of them will last more than a year!
Plus, it is way more than "just" a fitness wearable. Where I live (northern germany) I see more and more people silently migrating to one, it is even impossible to get a watch at any local retailer now, sold out everywhere.
The good: Apple replaced it no questions asked. The bad: It took 4-5 weeks to send me a replacement.
Interestingly, I didn't miss the watch at all while it was out for a replacement. Honestly, I don't find it that useful, I got it because I wanted a new toy. I will admit that the latest WatchOS makes the slowness a lot more tolerable, but still painful.
I now feel very foolish for how much I've spent on various FitBit devices that constantly failed.
Why don't watches count as wearables though? I've literally never had a watch break on me in my life, except for a cheap mechanical watch (you get what you pay for). If these things were just built like digital watches they'd be fine.
I owned a Microsoft Band 1 and Microsoft Band 2 since the day they came out. My Band 1 broke twice in two different ways, and my Band 2 died 3 times. Microsoft replaced them free of charge every time, which was great. So in 2 years with the Band I had 5 devices die on me. Other than that it was a terrific device.
Microsoft isn't coming out with a Band 3 so the last time it died they replaced it with a FitBit Charge 2, which I'm enjoying so far, and the design seems more resilient than the Band (though time will tell).
I don't buy this. Many, many millions of fitness brands have been sold, for combined billions of dollars, over a good number of years. We are not on the startup upswing anymore. I'm not quite expecting perfection yet, but I am expecting them to not outright suck. The construction methods are clearly inferior -- the damn things just fall apart because they are glued, rather than using fasteners. They are making low quality, designed-for-obsolescence junk. Many of the flaws, like coming up with a good band that attaches around your wrist and doesn't break, were solved in wristwatches over a hundred years ago.
Last time I had one die (it literally fell apart, the glue letting go) they told me that they have changed this policy and are no longer doing that.
I now wear a Withings activity tracker watch. I haven't had it long enough to know how long it'll last, but I know one thing: When the band broke, I was able to buy an after-market replacement cheap and put it on myself. This was not possible on most Fitbit devices.
I decided to upgrade to the Charge 2 for 2017. Last week the heart rate sensor stopped working. I've been using it for exactly 4 weeks. They are replacing it for free.
I'm a bit shocked at the number of defects.
After a few weeks, like clockwork, the rubber housing will start to peal away from the display, eventually leading to the glue coming unstuck and the housing bubbling up.
Needless to say, I'll not be bothering with fitbit again.
... and I say this as one of the people that fitbit just laid off today, for what it's worth. They're actually pretty good products now.
Warranty replacement was fine in that first 12 months, just a week or two to get the replacement. The final one they just offered a discount on a new purchase. At this rate it's more like you are leasing their band a year at a time. I'm done.
I'm a firm believer that the charge hr had a major software flaw that caused it's battery life to halve but Fitbit will never admit it. After a certain firmware version the battery life was terrible. The fitbit support forums show the same trend.
Garmin fitness trackers have much higher build quality and seem to have a fairly good reputation among athletes. But they cost several times more than a Fitbit.
How we managed to go from watches, which are a solved problem and just work, to shitty fitness trackers that break in an embarrassing number of stupid ways, I'll never know. All you had to do was take a normal running watch and add sensors to it. But nope. Instead we got all these inferior bands that break constantly because they're literally glued together. My Garmin, meanwhile, is held together with four tiny metal Torx screws. The difference in quality, and how many corners are cut on fitness bands, is so immediately obvious that it just screams out at you.
This is an opportunity for Apple. They could come in with an "express sport" offering at under half the pricing of the current Apple Watch, optimized as a watch, fitness monitor, listening to media during your workout, and for only charging once a week. (I'm thinking around $120) The selling point would be that you'd pay more than a Fitbit, but you'd get better build quality, experience, and support.
In my case, getting burned was quite literal. I had a Fitbit Force and was one of the thousands who wound up getting a chemical burn on my wrist from wearing the device. It took about six weeks for it to subside.
Fitbit's response was sub-par. They finally did recall all the devices, but it took them way too long to admit a problem existed and to act on it. They initially dismissed the whole thing as potential sensitivity to metal, when clearly something different was going on.
A TV station spent a year filing FOIA requests with the CPSC, etc trying to chase down what happened. The best they could come up with was that perhaps trapped sweat in the charge port could get converted to sodium hydroxide when you plug in the charger, and that would imply that you got a lye burn on your arm.
http://abc13.com/technology/possible-cause-of-fitbit-rashes-...
The burn that I had was definitely localized right to where the charge port would contact my wrist.
I think we've all had the same experience with the band/casing (personally mine haven't lasted long enough to have issues with the charge-port. Currently mine is wrapped up with tinfoil tape which is doing a good job of keeping my 2nd warrenty charge-HR alive). As far as the electronics hardware I don't actually have much of an issue. Some recent update required location for syncing but after I read into it it sounded like it was actually a google/android issue, not fitbit.
I won't go as far as you to decry fitbit but they waited far too long and lost far to much goodwill on an issue as simple (seemingly) as the freaking band.
That said, I did have an issue with the band just above the screen starting to delaminate. Heard they'd send me a new one so I made a claim and got a new one.
For $150, does about what I'd expect, and is about as durable as I'd expect.
See the black band that wraps around the charging port? There's no screws in it. It's simply glued on. The charging cable uses metal prongs to attach into that port, and over time, it will eventually defeat the glue and pull the black band off the Fitbit entirely. Then you can no longer attach the cable to charge it. I've heard of lots of other people who've experienced this same problem. It's a bad design flaw.
Fitbit totally killed itself for me when it decided to launch its own ecosystem without integrating itself into HealthKit and Google Fit. I understand that they thought they were creating an ecosystem for their users but by choosing to ignore the platforms that the major OS manufacturers had created, they essentially locked everyone out of integration with non-Fitbit devices. I bought a Fitbit Aria scale and a Fitbit device and was furious when I found out that I couldn't integrate that data with MyFitnessPal or RunKeeper or Strava without buying another app to allow syncing to the Fitbit website.
Now I have an Apple Watch and we traded our scale for a Withings scale that works with HealthKit and Google Fit and everyone in the family is happy whether they're on Android or iOS. Walled gardens are fine but not if they're locked, walled gardens.
They launched their own ecosystem before both HealthKit and Google Fit existed; there was nothing for them to integrate with.
Edit: Fitbit launched their web integration in 2012 and there are mentions of a partnership from both Google and Apple from the same year. It doesn't sound like your statement is as truthful as you may think.
I'm much happier with my Apple Watch as a fitness tracker, I wish the battery was better and it had sleep tracking support because that's the one feature I seriously miss from my Charge HR.
In the Fitbit Android app, Google Fit is authorised, although doesn't appear under the compatible apps. That's why I had the suspicion Google Fit might download the data off through Fitbit's REST API.
Weirdly, activities without GPS are not in Google Fit.
Note: personally I don't understand the strong bias in the fitness platforms toward stepcounts and running, especially outdoors. No push-sit-pull ups, kettlebell, indoor rowing and cycling, weight training with reps counts… these can be easily tracked and recognised (or could be collaboratively trained by the end-user) with precise gyroscopes and accelerometers.
Looking at the stock price and talking a little with the employees, it was hard to get excited. It had gone from an initial surge of $47/share to $14/share. It looked like an overeager IPO to raise funds for a company that really hadn't quite figured out its market yet. We've seen them many times, but I'm not yet sure what the commonality is. Not having a lasting market? Not having the growth potential?
Most people at the company had an optimistic outlook, but it would be hard to work there and do recruiting otherwise.
The next likely killer application for wearables is probably automation, authentication and interaction with other devices. However the problem in this area is that the standards are too fragmented (AllJoyn, Homekit, Google's Brillo, etc) and the devices didn't reach critical mass, yet.
But you can be sure wearable devices won't fade away.
The "to some extent" part is precisely a big part of my point when I mention fragmented standards and absence of critical mass. An incomplete killer application is not really "killer".
Other devices (e.g: Android wear with smart-lock and Google Pay) also suffer from the "to some extent" illness.
But you made a very good point about FitBit not being able to replicate. Their devices are too focused on health and notification. They don't even have the hardware to go beyond that.
I'd love it if I could securely store all of my passwords on an Apple Watch, which would require my fingerprint to unlock. But only if there was Bluetooth integration for macOS and USB devices for integration with random computers.
Another step would be a extra 1Password pin, of some other kind of something you know code. A 4 pad touch screen that could use a combination of short press, long press, force-touch press as a combination would be pretty cool, come to think of it.
Long before it was 'trendy' the monitoring your hearbeat etc market was there for serious athletes. That is, and continues to be a niche market. So there are too many players chasing too few customers who aren't going to upgrade their equipment every year and aren't willing to pay a monthly service charge for reading that equipment so the market seems quite a bit smaller than it once appeared.
Unless they actually launch a revised Time 2 under a different name, I'm flummoxed as to how they'll capture my interest.
Fitbit and the entire wearable industry is in a similar position to Pandora and Twitter. There's a massive need to re-adjust expectations.
You can build a very successful music streaming business, social communication company, and wearable manufacturing company... if you gauge the size of your market correctly. Guess wrong and Expenses > Revenues = panic (unless you've got Uber's pocketbook).
There's also the matter of how the acquisition was paid for: if you're a company at risk of going under, offering stock compensation is very, very cheap for you.
Accurately measure my heart rate and stop bugging me about a stupid text!
The only wearable I have is a Xiaomi Band 2, and the only reason I use it is for its 18 day battery, detects when I go to sleep so I don't have to toggle it every night, that it vibrates when I get a call so I can have my phone on silent and has a clock. I rarely check how many steps I take even though that's what is supposed to be it's primary functionality.
I use that wearable to make my life easier, not to interrupt me every time I get a notification, and I certainly don't want to charge it every few days.
They're regressing.
The Charge 2 does cost more at retail presently, however.
Plus, as the icing on the cake: you can easily get a week or more of use with a single charge, if you don't use the GPS.
Automatic sleep tracking is abysmal (regularly off by >4 hours, sometimes more). The wrist heart rate monitor tends to have inaccurate spikes at least once a day, and when the watch doesn't detect motion the wrist heart rate sensor is essentially turned off (sampling rate goes to greater than once every 30 minutes). Resting heart rate is calculated in at least 3 different ways in various parts of the UI (and none of them seem accurate). And then there's the tons and tons of bugs (and terrible iOS companion app).
Honestly the hardware is ok, but I get the impression that Garmin just hasn't invested in (or doesn't know how to do) software. It's not worth the (very high) asking price in my opinion.
It works almost flawlessly. GPS pickup is less than 30 seconds in nearly all situations. The wrist-based HR is accurate to within 1-2 BPM during activities when measured against Wahoo Tickr and Polar heart-rate straps (but the flaw: it's slow to pick up sudden jumps in HR, such as during intervals). The battery lasts at least a week with 2 hours of active GPS use a day (and almost 2 weeks with battery saving features enabled and GLONASS off). I've dropped it on asphalt, concrete, and rock and it doesn't even have a scratch.
My guess is that most of your problems are on the iOS end. Apple is notorious for breaking interoperability with wearables through iOS "updates" since the iWatch was released. Polar and Suunto watches also seem to have issues for iPhone users that don't crop up for people syncing their watches with their computers or Androids.
Garmins are buggy though, but once you get used to working around the most common bugs they are quite reliable.
I think Garmin just had the best devices in the early days, and now rely more upon brand loyalty (myself included) than technical advances. Touch bezels in the Forerunner range deserve a special place in design hell though.
(Granted I'm not the average Garmin user as I'm more interested in ultra-distance.)
Yes---all of these failed and failing players keep trying to push some overly ambitious platform vision, and no one is focused on perfecting the health tracking app that is getting them in the door in the first place. And for god's sake, give us the option to keep our own data locally. I don't want the Cloud to know every time I go to the bathroom.
And honestly, I think this is exactly why Fitbit ended up failing. They tried to create a walled garden where you would collect all your data into their service, the hardware wasn't what they wanted to sell you, but their premium services.
I can't comment too much on quality yet, but the charging cable now grips the entire device, so that should help avoid some of the issues they've had in the past.
I'd love to have access to my watches display, sensor, and communications features.
Samsung's Tizen and Garmin's ANT seem quite open too, but I just studied the documentation, didn't actually wrote code for them.
Xiaomi's Mi band, FitBit and Apple Watch are very restricted.
FWIW, my wife and I used several generations of Jawbone UP over a few years and, we roughly go through 1 every 3-6 months. It's certainly not Fitbit only.
Compared to the Apple watch, we have a pair of 1st gens, one of them's battery and display spoilt after 12-13 months, the other is still going strong at ~14/15 months.
I suspect that fitness trackers and smartwatches are like that, too, but that it's more like 20% of the features.
Maybe their product is just too simple and does it's job too well. Judging by trends in the market, people won't be satisfied until their watches have about 8h of battery life and are privy to all the 0-days of android.
Ignore my grumbling, I'm just an old fossil who wants phones to at least be phones and watches to at least be watches. Call quality on my phone seems to drop every year, and my wife's $500 smart watch barfs on syncing her music library.