Google is removing a useful website interface for Fitbit users and forcing them onto a mobile app instead.
Google seemingly just made the Fitbit user experience a lot worse.
The fitness-focused wearable brand, which Google bought in 2021, announced in a post on its community forums that the web browser interface for looking at a user's individual health metrics will shut down on July 8. From now on, the only way to access any Fitbit stats will be through the mobile app.
"Combined with Google’s decades of being the best at making sense of data, it’s our mission to be one combined Fitbit and Google team," the post read. "Consolidating the Fitbit.com dashboard into the Fitbit app is a part of that mission, and will allow us to focus on features that provide even more valuable insights to our users."
There are a couple of major problems with this, as pointed out by users on the forum and Ars Technica. For starters, there are apparently certain features from the website that aren't currently in the mobile app, like certain advanced graphs. Second, the Fitbit app doesn't work on tablets, so people who need or prefer to look at their fitness data on a larger screen for any reason seem to be left hanging here.
Perhaps Google will do the necessary and hard work to fix those problems, but the announcement post didn't provide much hope in that regard.
