I purchased my first FitBit very early on and have purchased a lot of FitBits for myself throughout the years and have purchased many more as gifts for family & friends. Shortly before we found out that Google had bought them, they really started going downhill. I thought that being purchased by Google would make the product better, but boy was I wrong. We had participated in and really enjoyed the weekly challenges. FitBit gained a lot of users in my friends and family, especially to participate in the step challenges, but lost the vast majority of them, when their devices needed to be replaced, due to the step challenges being removed. Two of my friends had just purchased their devices 2 & 3 months prior to when challenges were removed, I still feel bad that I recommended FitBit to them. But Google wasn’t done there, next they took some of the included features like Health Trends and moved them to “Premium”. So a monthly cost was now required to access a lot of the features that were included when I purchased the watch. Companies should not be allowed to remove features or start charging for features, when they are part of the original purchase price. They have slowly removed the features that I am paying extra for. They have changed the Health Trends from being able to see your Heart Rate, Respiratory Rate, and Oxygen Saturation throughout each day to only being able to see the high and low for each day. To now only being able to see the average of each daily, which is pretty much useless for Health Tracking.
The features I cared about and convinced me to choose FitBit over the alternatives are now completely gone, even though I am still paying monthly for Premium. My Fibit stopped charging 2 days ago. This is not the first time. This happened once before and after about a week, it started charging again. I have already replaced the propriety charger 2 or 3 times, it’s almost like the pins are meant to break/bend. I am NOT going to buy another charger or device that has anything to do with Google ever. If it’s dead then so be it, I have been basically using it as an expensive pedometer anyway. If Google thinks that bricking our devices, will encourage us to purchase a new one, or ANY Google product for that matter, they and their stockholders are going to be very disappointed. I am done.
