Fitbit Coach will become part of Fitbit Premium

[FitbitCommunity]

To the Fitbit Coach community,

Fitbit Coach is now becoming part of Fitbit Premium. Fitbit remains committed to providing all the tools you need to live a healthier, more active lifestyle. To give you more choices for working out as well as the range of additional features check out Fitbit Premium. With the Fitbit Coach workout content now in the Fitbit app, and to allow you to use one app going forward, we’ll shut down the Coach mobile app, Coach website and Coach app on Fitbit smartwatches on July 30, 2021. 

If you’re currently paying for a Coach membership, here’s what you can expect:

• Annual members— you’ll soon receive a prorated refund of the remainder of your Coach membership

• Monthly members— you won’t incur any further monthly membership charges

As an exclusive offer to support Coach members through this transition, if you’re not already a Fitbit Premium member, you can try Fitbit Premium for a full year at no additional cost if you sign up by July 30, 2021. 

To start your Premium trial, make sure you download the Fitbit app and log into your account before you get started (you must use the same email address for Fitbit Coach and the Fitbit app to take advantage of this offer). Then, open the Coach app on your phone and tap the message at the top of the screen to start your Premium trial.

Have questions? Click here for more information.

Thank you for being a loyal Coach member, and we look forward to continuing to support your health and fitness goals. 

[Pittstown]

The coach app offered full-screen video on my iPad.

the Fitbit app is just a scaled-up phone app — NOT THE SAME!
Will there be an iPad native app so I can get full screen video?

also, I agree with other posters about not being able to find the equivalent programs and auto-workout selection.

will that feature be migrated?

what about my workout history?

[agba]

Has anybody been able to redeem the free year of premium through the link in Fitbit Coach app??

When I open the link, it takes me to the fitbit app saying I'm already a Fitbit Premium customer (I am, through Fitbit coach, at half of the price, btw, because I subscribed to it when it first launched, so now I will be paying double...).

When I go to fitbit.com website, it says I am not currently a fitbit premium subscriber, and I can get a 90 day free trial.

Am I doing something wrong? Should I be doing something different? I tried live chat on fitbit website, they said they have to look into it and couldn't help me right away.

[CollinM]

@agba Premium subscriptions are, in short, a complete mess. Your milage may vary in how correctly everything is processed (there are a lot of threads here on the forum complaining about issues with premium and payments/activations).

That being said I know that you need to do the free trail with the same email address that you used for Fitbit Coach. Use an account that does not use that email address and you won't be recognised as being eligible for the 1 year free trail. You might want to verify that the email addresses match. If that matches probably your best bet is to deal with customer support. But judging from posts on the forum here this can take weeks (most effective seems to call them).

I tried activating the premium myself and I also couldn't redeem my 1 year free trial (got an error message, can't remember what it was). With all the users complaining about issues with payments (and the non-refundable detail even if Fitbit made a mistake) I didn't dare try again. After I learned that premium doesn't compare at all with what Fitbit offered I haven't bothered again. It's not worth the price for me with the offered functionality.

[agba]

@CollinM Thanks. It is the same email address, always has been, they have not been able to help me as of yet. Wanted a screenshot of the offer, and wanted to know how long I was a Fitbit Coach subscriber (from the very beginning of Fitbit Coach), after I gave them all the info - they have not got back to me. It really is a mess. Such a shame, I love fitbit and their customer service used to be great.

[chris.obrien]

So Fitbit Coach ended on July 30th. While I had checked the workouts on Fitbit before the 30th, I had hoped that there would be some migration of the workouts from Fitbit Coach to Fitbit or that versions of  some of the incremental workouts that I or others had done were migrated. Instead, the organization of the Fitbit workouts section is a complete mess-- disorganized in terms of type of workouts, time, difficulty, etc. and mixed in with other topics. Google owns Fitbit and it is incredible that between the two there are no engineers, developers or design and marketing folks who could sort out this mess. I have now also subscribed to FitOn just to see how that works for now. Still looking for alternatives. I signed up for Fitstar that became Fitbit Coach because the incremental programs that changed every day, were very helpful for my workouts and eliminated the need to sort through different workouts every day. It seems to me that Google is doing to Fitbit what Microsoft did to Skype- destroying the brand.

[VersaDude]

Probably can blame google -- who knows. But even before the google acquisition, coach became stagnant development-wise and Fitbit started making some strange self-harmful business decisions, so I don't know if google is the culprit here.

[CollinM]

@chris.obrien @VersaDude Google is not to blame here. This is a pattern of decisions and lack of quality that started years ago. I noticed this a long time ago with the drop in quality from their support team and noticed issue starting to crop up in how they handle their software (more bugs, taking longer to resolve, etc). The only blame you might be able to ascribe to Google is not coming down hard on these patterns. But the acquisition was finalised in January this year, and these kind of changes take time (if they're working on it that is).

I do not have high hopes that this will change any time soon. Considering how was responded to complaints/feedback on this topic, no change in how they presented the Coach change, and the closing of our feature request is telling to me. It really demonstrates that communication between departments doesn't work anymore.

At the moment I'm quite happy with FitOn. A former Fitbit executive created this and it shows, as I can see in it what Fitbit was a long time ago. It's not tailored to your levels. But they do give constant information on how you can adjust exercises to your level. There's a constant stream of new content. And after 2 months with it I now know what I can expect from which trainer and how to judge exercises. So it's not a perfect replacement but it comes close enough that I'm happy with it. Basically it offers a better experience than what Premium does and it's free.

[CollinM]

Forgot to mention that with FitOn you can create a customised exercise program based on your goals, how often you want to exercise, for how long, and what type of exercises you like to do. This is what kept me with FitOn after trying several other free and paid apps.

[thenamesgould]

Another vote for FitOn here ... as mentioned it doesn't have the automatic changes in intensity, but the different options for difficulty that the guides give for the workouts work just as well.

With the amount of different activities it has (pilates, HIIT, stretches, yoga, kickboxing, etc etc etc) and the range of different instructors which keep you interested, I actually prefer it to Coach! Can't believe it's free, I actually paid for the pro version because even that is really cheap, just to support it!

[chris.obrien]

Thanks for your comments on FitOn and you are right it may not be Google's fault. There are a lot of management issues at Fitbit itself. The FitOn app is much better organized- the premium is cheaper but they also market special programs for an additional fee. Not sure what they are like. Have also looked at Kineticoach but that app does not have a trainer on screen. It seems to choose the exercises for you and makes a demo available. Not sure what the difference between free and premium Kineticoach is.

[Drrck11]

Another bad business-decision Fitbit. You take away the ability to load our own music to the Versa 3 and Sense, and now you take away Fitbit Coach. Are trying to turn away customers?😒

[Yige]

I have already switched to fiit.tv

[Tourmalily]

Disappointed. The premium workouts aren't personalized, there's no algorithms designed to help me find the optimal workout for my current fitness level, and none of the premium video workouts have previews or demonstrations of the moves they contain so I can decide if I want to do them or not. 

I will absolutely be cancelling my membership until or unless Fitbit addresses this. Why should I continue to pay for a loss of functionality???

[SunsetRunner]

I'm a bit disappointed in FitBit here. A couple of weeks ago I decided to purchase a Inspire and it came with a year of premium. I knew that coach would become part of the Fitbit app, but I'm missing some of the features. Before a session of a workout program would open in Coach and I could download it before going on a run. It would even load some nice music. But now I need to have an active internet connection to even follow a session (cannot pre-download). So following a program is actually costing me money apart from the premium membership! Ridiculous that they didn't implement even this basic functionality before shutting down Coach. There wasn't even a warning that it was using my mobile data for downloading the session during the run!

[SunsetRunner]

Couldn't agree more. Just found out also that we won't be able to access any workouts via laptop, ONLY on phones! This is a joke. Fitib? You have dropped the ball on this one. Big time!!

[CollinM]

@SunsetRunner Well that's just the thing. They didn't make Coach part of Premium, they shut down Coach. Nothing of the functionality provided through Coach was migrated to Premium. They only ported some of the workout videos. What they said was just their marketing speak that turned out to be misleading if you actually asked what they were doing.

[SunsetRunner]

Why can't we pre (down)load these workouts? Now I'm paying for premium, but if I want to go for a run (for example) I need to have a working internet connection for the workout to keep playing. So I'm also paying for the data that I use. You are forcing your users to do that if they want to do any exercise outside of their wifi range.

[Andi50]

Really sad that they have decided to cancel Fitbit Coach. I’ve literally been using it since it was FitStar and I’m beyond disappointed that they would think that Fitbit  premium at double the price is any kind of substitute for what Fitbit coach was. Just go ahead and completely ignore your user base then. Everything good gets canceled dang it 😖😤

[Hulk75]

Having just 1 App for Fitbit is an advantage, but this is where it stops.

Personalised workout programs GONE!
Preview list include exercise demo GONE!
Sensible categories for workout types GONE!
Download of workouts GONE!

Full screen exercise display on iPad GONE!
Selecting instructor GONE!
Annoying music with exercises GONE!

premium app is not working probably, at least not for me, the full body category in workouts doesn’t load. Also not after several attempts of troubleshooting. Not on android, not on iPad. Is that just me, just UK? 

Fitbit/google are not just getting paid for premium version, but are also getting lots of very valuable personal date (which is the actual purpose/business model of Fitbit). So the App change shouldn’t be a step back, but give users, who provide personal data for free at least the service they received before. But to be honest, I would have expect some significant improvements! Giving out free premium memberships, which hasn’t worked for many current subscribers as well, is not an improvement; it’s just not making people pay for giving away their personal data.

question for Fitbit: when is the previous service level of the coaching re-installed and improved?

[pcharby]

How do I get my refund for the Premium membership, since my yearly renewal happened at the end of June.  There's no reason to have it now that Coach has been destroyed/decommissioned.  What has been placed on the Fitbit app is a joke and is unusable.

I've gone through Google Play to get my refund, but Fitbit doesn't do refunds.  I spoke with someone at Fitbit Support and they referred me back to Google Play.

Any thoughts on next steps to get a pro-rated refund back on a product that they made defective?