I always thought this was simply nothing more than an overpriced step counter and nothing changed the perception for me - if anything, the glorified marketing felt quite deceptive. Strangely, on the contrary, I find myself addicted to the "step counter" on my Galaxy S6 everytime I go for a run.
I have a Fitbit for exactly two reasons: sleep tracking and heart rate. The step counter is interesting, but I wouldn't have bought a device just for that.
I have a charge hr -- mostly for silent alarms to wake me up without disturbing my roommates, and timer function in case I need to track something. Oddly enough I don't care about the step counter or the heartrate sensor.
Android Wear is very open, it is very much the same api as normal Android. The main limitations are on the UI and a few specific issues like bluetooth advertising. Tbh, even Pebble didn't allow you so much access as Android Wear (e.g.: Pebble's bluetooth api was very limited).
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.
I've started working on my take over the world side project and it has a watchOS component. I've been pleasantly surprised with the access to the CoreMotion and HealthKit data on the watch, as well as the ease of access for accessing the network directly or passing data and files back and forth with the iOS companion app.
So buying Pebble was nothing but their previous try at surviving in a challenging wearable market? It's really difficult to wrap my head around these two recent moves in a way that makes sense.
I think its pretty easy, Pebble adds some additional "watch" market, and if you lay off the people you've added more customers without adding a lot of additional cost.
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.
They bought the Pebble assets for <$40 million. The engineering knowledge and brand awareness was a steal and must-do, even for a struggling company. Remember, they still did $500 million in revenue in Q4.
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).
I've been acquired into a company that dumped 90% of employees six weeks later. (Acqui-fired) Either the group buying and the group firing didn't talk, or they just changed their minds right after. Kind of a bummer, our company made money and was just deleted as it got sucked into their black hole of failure. Spent a lot of time trying to reconcile the two events, sometimes there just is no larger plan to figure out
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.
They're probably planning to get acquired. Buying companies to increase their value, then laying off staff so they can keep the lights on until someone with more money comes along.
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.
The charge 2 is the same price as the old one -- but I'd agree if they could put an actual gps tracker on a $150 watch -- like with polar m200 -- it'd be a better competitor to other fitness bands.
This is why I've been eyeing a Garmin Vivoactive HR. I know people slam Garmin because they feel behind but if there is one thing they know it's accuracy. There's a reason they're the goto brand for cyclists, runners and triathletes. It's because they work reliably.
Consider also the Fenix 3 - it was plagued with software bugs when launched but the firmware is now stable and delivers what it says on the tin. You get a nice smartwatch and fitness tracker with GPS/GLONASS and good integration to other sensors (Bluetooth and ANT).
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.
I have a Fenix 3 HR, and unfortunately I couldn't disagree more. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
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.
I have the Fenix 3 HR, and I couldn't disagree with you more.
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.
I like my Vivoactive HR and can confirm its reliability. Just be aware it's pretty large compared to a fitness band, more like the size of the Apple watch. Also, I wish they had contoured the heart rate LED bulge; it digs into my skin occasionally. Nothing else comes close to its combination of activities tracked, battery life and low cost.
> There's a reason they're the goto brand for cyclists, runners and triathletes. It's because they work reliably.
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.)
The Garmin Edge 500 is going to go down as the best cycling computer ever. I have a 510 and touch interface leaves a lot to be desired, but I can't complain with how well it does on my bike. Was out for 10 hours last year (5-6 moving) and the day ended with something like 30% battery. Never skipped a beat with my sensors or GPS
My most reliable fit wearable so far has been my Wii U Fit Meter. It's about as smart as a Tamagotchi, but it gets the job done for me. Data xfer via IR instead of radio. CR2032 battery goes for a few months. I find it a clever balance of cheap tech and engineering trade-offs - very Nintendo in that regard.
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.
I am quite curious to see what will happen with Android Wear devices and Apple Watch, as the weareable hype is kinda declining (and once it was "the next big thing").
My impression is that Fitbit is seeing a lot of pressure from devices like the Apple Watch. Though I've encountered people who still like and use a Fitbit even after purchasing an Apple Watch, I can see that declining in the future. I think wrist devices like the Apple Watch and similar Android devices are here to stay, especially as they get smaller, have added features, and the UX improves.
So long, farewell! Don't let the door hit you on the butt.
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.
Yes, but it doesn't sync with HealthKit/Google Fit directly. You have to go through MyFitnessPal and login to your Fitbit account. You're two steps removed from direct integration and sharing with any other apps on your device.
I can see why there's no direct integration -- isn't it better for a company to ask permission for your data before using it? Like how if you want to sign up for a website through Facebook or Google, they ask first.
That's precisely how HealthKit and Google Fit work, though. You have to allow them access to the app data. The thing with the Fitbit data, though, is that there is no option to even access the data. It doesn't share it at all and doesn't have an option to share it. You either use the Fitbit website or you don't get to see your data. Some apps have hacked work arounds to get the basic data by scraping web data but it's not a true integrated solution. It's crap.
Ah I get what you're saying. So FitBit doesn't allow other sites to access your data stored. What the heck, I feel like that would damage their utility.
Yeah, and that's what everyone is complaining about and what I think is the single biggest thing to kill the Fitbit. They wanted to lock people in to their ecosystem so that people would want to buy only Fitbit products to have them all work together but, instead, people tended to start with a Fitbit and then move on to other products that actually worked together with the other products they already bought or planned to buy.
While that may be true, Fitbit was one of the launch partners for HealthKit and debuted their web interface at the Apple Keynote where HealthKit was first shown. Google had info online that Fitbit was working with them from the start to include integrations. They pulled out of both after they had already had a functional integration.
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.
The lack of HealthKit integration and needing to use half-assed hacks like the sync apps on the iOS AppStore really turned me off fitbit. Since their API doesn't let you pull anything but basic data like steps walked you were effectively locked into their little garden with your data.
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.
Fairly confident there's sleep tracker software available. People have had success in charging it for ~15 minutes at night before bed, then charging it in the morning while getting going.
AutoSleep app does a decent job of retrofiting sleep tracking into the apple watch. With a data lockin, I have an Aria scale, and Sync Solver is good at extracting Fitbit data into the HealthKit.
My Fitbit Charge 2 activity appears on Google Fit. Google Fit tends to recalculate some of the values (e.g. distance and calories) based on what Fitbit transmitted / pulled from Fitbit (haven't bother to check). I don't know this happens via their API, or bluetooth over my phone or both.
Do you possibly have an app like MyFitnessPal that aggregates that data? None of the Fitbit devices sync with Google Fit but there are apps that read Fitbit data if you have the Fitbit app installed that and make assumptions of what the values should be.
I have Endomondo and LifeFitness on, but neither seems to track these. Maybe they just bypasses.
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.
To me it looks like only big Internet companies or companies in CE space can pull of in this space. Because both have an unbelievable advantage in terms of ecosystem. If outsider fails to integrate into this existing space - there is likelihood of they not making into longer runs.
Even if you are a premium fitbit user and use their customer API you don't have access to some data point for heart rate, cardio time-frames and performance stats. They not only need to catch-up but also provide people their own health data forget HealthKit and Google Fit integration that is like step 2.
They don't WANT to provide people their own health data, I'm guessing. They demoed a full integration with HealthKit years ago but canned it, I'm guessing for the exact same reason.
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 am a developer and I was a fitbit premium user for long time but I cancelled my subscription. I went over all their APIs but failed to get data where I can export my detailed workout and cardio stats. My main purpose was train myself for even more intense workout looking at the data. It was just a very disappointing experience.
FWIW, I set up IFTTT to export to a Google Sheet daily. Not sure if it will give you the level of detail unless the API is already providing it though.
Wearables only have 2 "killer applications", so far: notifications and fitness. To broaden their appeal they need to find others. I don't think that will happen this year.
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 Apple Watch can do authentication to some extent: Authy has an Apple Watch app, and there's Apple Pay. This is the kind of stuff I don't think Fitbit can easily duplicate, which is why I think they're going to struggle in the future.
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.
The Apple Watch can do authentication to some extent: Authy has an Apple Watch app, and there's Apple Pay.
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.
1Password has an Apple Watch app, and you can choose the passwords you want to have on your watch. With a PIN on the watch that locks it when taken off one's wrist, I'm pretty happy with that sort of security.
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.
After 3 Fitbit Charge HRs dying on me within a year, I've left FitBit and moved on to Garmin. It's a shame because my Flex was solid for multiple years.
I've had the exact same problem both with the Flex and then with the Charge HR. Their hardware quality is just terrible, especially given that they're expected you to pay >$100 on their devices! I now go out of my way to actively dis-recommend Fitbit (as I've done in this comments thread).
hmm, that is the opposite of my experience. My mom has an original fitbit and me and my wife have the fitbit charge HRs. I actually thought when I read the title that it was due to lack of demand as everyone I know has one and sees no reason to get a newer one.
I'm surprised. It seems like for the last several months I've been noticing fitbits on the wrist of several prominent people.
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.
Nine months ago I had an offer to join Fitbit's engineering team. When I first started interviewing I didn't even realize the company had gone public a six months before. I guess I missed the news.
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.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: A big part of Fitbit's problem is the poor hardware quality of their products, especially considering the high price. A lot of people, me included, will never buy another Fitbit after having been burned.
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.
Is your experience emblematic of the that for most customers? Some of the things you mention seem like fundamental design flaws, so I'm curious if most customers have issues?
We had similar issues with my wife's charge. To Fitbit's credit, they were happy to send out multiple replacements, but my wife got tired of it and stopped using it after the 3rd replacement starting showing the same issue. By contrast, I have an old Fitbit One which still works well after all these years, but it's just a simple pod as opposed to a wrist band.
Couldn't such a lenient return policy signal that these devices really are being marked up a ridiculous amount? I.e. $10 devices going somewhat unfairly for > $100 as mentioned above?
Could also just be that they care about their customers or at least their reputation even if they failed to create the product they wanted to create in the first place.
I've had mine for more than a year and a half -- my charge hr hasn't failed yet. But my cousins' have, which leads me to wonder what if the issue is user-caused.
I wasn't rough on it. I wore it 24/7, except in showers/water and when charging it. I don't tend to break anything else in my normal life; I'm not one of those people who's rough on things. I just had repeated Fitbit failures.
Personally, I've had two fitbits, bought mother-in-law a fitbit, and have another friend who also had one and all of ours broke for similar reasons listed as OP, all in the second or third year of wearing it.
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!)
I think this is a problem with wearables in general. All in all, I've never seen a wearable last more than 9-10 months. I'm not that rough on them either.
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!
meanwhile I'm still in love with my perfectly working apple watch (1st gen). There was (and is) laughter about the topic and apple doing it, but really, this $300 device integrated in my daily life to the point of missing it when not wearing.
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.
My anacdata: My 1st gen Apple Watch needed replacement due to faulty band-locking mechanisms (New OEM Apple bands would slide right through instead of locking).
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 think this is a problem with wearables in general. All in all, I've never seen a wearable last more than 9-10 months.
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.
But this is endemic to the industry. I still caution fitness band buyers that they should consider themselves early adopters who should expect some troubles while the quality evolves.
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 still caution fitness band buyers that they should consider themselves early adopters who should expect some troubles while the quality evolves.
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.
Yup. I've owned quite a few of their devices, and every one of them died within 3 years. Previously, though, they were pretty good about replacing them even if they were out of warranty. I often eventually upgraded to the newest, knowing that I didn't really have to worry about the hardware, as they had great customer service.
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.
Glad to see I'm not the only one with that plastic housing problem. Once that comes off, you pretty much can't charge your device. I superglued mine back on, but it's just asking for trouble having to do that so close to the connectors.
I had a Fitbit Flex. I had the band tear 3 times last year. Fitbit replaced it for free each time. Eventually the little device inside stopped holding a charge. They replaced that for free too.
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.
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.
If you're using a Charge HR, I'd suggest checking out the newer generation of devices. The Charge 2 and Alta are way better designs. The entire category of problem you're experiencing will not exist in those.
... 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.
My Fitbit won the prize for being the only hardware/software to blue screen my Windows computer in at least a decade. It actually took me a few hours to figure out what was happening because I never suspected simply plugging in that device could do it. Sure enough, after 5 minutes or less it would hard crash my computer. I promptly gave it away and will never buy another one. I read some Amazon reviews where people talked about being on their 8th Fitbit and decided they have a real problem.
Isn't that more a Windows problem? An OS should never crash entirely because a device was plugged in. Fitbit probably should've caught that in testing though.
It also could be a defect in the host computer's USB controller. Sometimes those issues have to be fixed in firmware; the OS isn't necessarily to blame.
Device drivers run in kernel mode and can bugcheck the machine. Microsoft can certainly provide tooling and help device driver writers write reliable drivers, but the device is still responsible for it's driver.
My understanding is that Windows supports user-mode drivers and Microsoft strongly encourages not writing kernel-mode drivers unless absolutely necessary. If Fitbit did that anyway though then it's definitely their fault.
Try buying an RAM upgraded Lenovo from Amazon. I saw the reviews and didn't believe it because I never had a problem w Lenovo's from Office Depot. Bad idea.
So far the Charge 2 is holding up well for me. I had problems with the Charge HR. Keeping my fingers crossed. Though I did manage to scratch the screen not a week after buying it. The only other issue is that I'm starting to realize that step tracking isn't really that valuable. At least I get some benefit from heart rate and sleep.
Most of the metrics with my Charge and now Charge 2 are inaccurate for any purpose other than trending info. Same with the Aria scale for Body fat %. They are not horribly inaccurate, just not terribly accurate. They are at least consistent however, and the graphs are useful to make sure my exercise, weight, etc are trending right. For me, that's enough - I want to be fit and healthy, I'm not trying to be highly tuned and in peak fitness. Those who are would probably want to look at other products.
I can see that, and it does match my expectations at least. It somewhat gamifies the process of me getting up from my desk every so often to walk around the lab complex.
I went through 3 charges in 13 months - two had the band delaminate and split, one bricked during a firmware upgrade.
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 had one brick during a firmware upgrade too. It wasn't even a firmware upgrade I started! It just started upgrading automatically and then died, for who knows what reason. It could've been as simple as it has no error recovery whatsoever and I moved my phone away from the band during the process (because I didn't know it was even happening).
I've had quality issues but every time I was sent a replacement promptly. I get the devices via my employers wellness plan so I'm not sure if that is some trigger for their support team or not.
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.
Perhaps the reason people commenting here have had so many problems with Fitbit devices is that they actually use them. From what I've seen, Fitbit's target market is primarily overweight people who don't really exercise much and leave them on the shelf.
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.
I have a Garmin Forerunner 10 which I haven't had any real problems with yet. I will say this about it, that makes me trust it infinitely more than any Fitbit I've ever had: It's built like a watch. A cheaper digital watch with a rubber band and plastic screen, granted, but still a watch nonetheless. And when you're not using it as a GPS tracker, it just functions as a normal digital wristwatch.
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.
Ugh, unfortunately, this is true. My Fitbit started peeling after less than a year. They replaced it with a brand new Fitbit. And now this new Fitbit is also peeling. They didn't make these to last at all! If you're using this every day like a watch you will encounter this problem. However, I like the product but man the quality sucks. I wouldn't buy it again but unfortunately not a lot of great alternatives out there now.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: A big part of Fitbit's problem is the poor hardware quality of their products, especially considering the high price. A lot of people, me included, will never buy another Fitbit after having been burned.
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.
>A lot of people, me included, will never buy another Fitbit after having been burned
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.
I think its worth pointing out that when most people say "hardware" when talking about the fitbit, we're talking about the band, charge port etc and not the electronics (which is usually what I'm talking about when I use the word "hardware").
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.
My charge HR's body is screwed together with 4 small torx screws. I don't see how the charging plug could pull any glued plastic apart.
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.
Bummer, I hope they can recover from this. I just got my wife a Charge 2, and she really likes it. It definitely does a better job at tracking things and encouraging fitness than any of the other devices we've owned (Flex, Charge, Apple Watch, Huawei Watch).
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.
Relevant to those mentioning the build quality of Fitbit devices:
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.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadI suspect that fitness trackers and smartwatches are like that, too, but that it's more like 20% of the features.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.