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Many countries favour using Kilojoules instead of calouries for enrgy input and output. Please add the option to choose in all relevent dashboard areas.
Even more, I did some research and found out that Under Armour, which makes My Fitness Pal, was in partnership with Fitbit but became a competitor last year when they released their own tracker.
Looked up their tracker, a package called HealthBox, and it looks brilliant.
So, unless Fitbit ups its game, I'll be upgrading to Under Armour when the time comes.
I am thinking of syncing with MFP too, tried it yesterday, integration seems to work fine. And to be honest MFP is a much better product for tracking food intake.
Still it shouldn't be hard for FB to implement, those 5 lines of code must be really hard to type.
I find it interesting that this discussion has gone on for so very long without Fitbit making the change.
I was given a new Fitbit for Father's Day yesterday (something else that is different in Australia to the US) to replace my older Garmin device. The Garmin still works, but has limited features. My Garmin shows me kilojoules and as most food product labelling shows energy in Kjs, it makes perfectly good sense to have a tracker that provides this option. Garmin = BIG TICK, Fitbit = bad fail.
This is akin to buying a US made car to drive in Australia and only having a speedo that shows MPH! Just silly.
Please listen to the people who buy your product and make this simple upgrade.
Since getting a fitbit and then realising it didn't do kilojoules, I simply gave up and haven't worn it since. Biggest waste of money. I wouldn't have even purchased it if I knew it didn't do kilojoules. I was hopeful that they would have introduced kilojoules by now.
So it's pretty simple. No kilojoules, no wearing it. No wearing it, no one seeing it and asking about. No one seeing and asking about means no recommendations/referrals. No recommendations means no sales. No sales, well, it shouldn't take a rocket scientist to work out whay happens next. It also shouldn't take a rocket scientist to change some simple code to calculate and display kilojoules.
Given that most of the world now uses kilojoules, before your brand looses market share to a competitor, and you likely go broke, why not give your customers what they want?
People outside of America use Kilojoules. When is your devices going to do this as well. People away from the US are starting to get annoyed and looking at other trackers.
Dont give me nonsense, about your software development team. If other trackers can do it, do can Fitbit.
After Christmas I will be looking for one that supports this function.
I find a firm that positions itself as a "GLOBAL" firm and limits a major component of it's product to an affectation of the United States of America (and Liberia and Myanmar) an oxymoron. The entire rest of the world deals in KJs. Shaking of head !
I recorded my intake using Fitbit and calories for six months before deciding to try syncing it with My Fitness Pal (owned by Under Armour, a competitor to Fitbit) about a month ago.
I use My Fitness Pal for kilojoule recording only (and long exercise sessions with Map My Run) and it automatically syncs with the Fitbit app, which gives me the total picture.
My Fitness Pal's food database is almost complete. It is rare I find something it doesn't recognise. It's user experience is also far superior to Fitbit's half a*sed calorie only attempt.
My suggestion is to do what I have done and, when the time comes to upgrade tracker, ditch Fitbit.
If Fitbit had kilojoules and a way for everyone to add food through the barcode reading (which it has but doesn't work) then it has enough users to generate a similar food database.
Probably others have said this already - but if I had known about the calories/kilojoules issue before buying - I would have looked further.... To be ignoring this simple request for more than four years is rather arrogant I feel.
I hear you on this but I discovered an even weirder thing. You can select a default country food type which obviously links to a database for look up. In my case, I have Australian as my default. But when I wanted to look up ‘grits’ for example, because I was on holiday in the USA, it couldn’t find it, I had to go into settings and change the country to America! There is no ‘global’ setting. So what if you go to an Indian restaurant and have a meal? Same deal! Now my previously used Garmin just had all foods in one big database, makes s lot more sense!
Time to acknowledge the rest of the World. Although given how long this request has been running, I suspect Fitbit do not care about anyone other than the US. My next tracker will support kilojoules.
Hi everyone, thanks for sharing this suggestion. By way of update, there aren't currently any plans to release this feature. Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback with us and we will let you know if anything changes.
Hi Liz, thanks but that is hardly an update. It's clear that there are no plans to release this feature, as it was first suggested in 2013 and despite numerous request and it being a pretty simple sort of change, it's been ignored. A real update would be "why" is it not being considered?
It just doesn't make sense that you swap your other units (e.g. distance) into metric, but wont swap energy into metric. it's not like this request is without context. In Australia the food labelling requires kJ. Sometimes you see kcal, but otherwise you force us to do a conversion each time we enter something.
So how about a real update? Have the developers actually assessed this request? If not why not? If so then why aren't they pursing it? Is it more complicated that we think? Please explain it as otherwise it looks like Fitbit is being ridiculous and you are upsetting a number of your customers but a) not having the feature, but b) not communicating on this request.
Hi @daedalus, thanks for responding. I realize it's frustrating to not get a full explanation. It can be a challenge for us to share the specifics around each feature suggestion decision for a variety of reasons. One of which is that it often involves sharing confidential information about how Fitbit devices work. This Feature Suggestions was discussed with the relevant team. Unfortunately we can’t always share the full picture with you, but we aim to share what we can. I will be posting some FAQs soon (which will live in the 'important links' section above), with a little more insight about how Feature Suggestions work and what we can share about them. Thanks for your comment.
Well, it's about time you admitted you can't be bothered. It's not even as if the request is for a "feature" -- I would have thought that having kilojoules as an option was a base level requirement for a fitness device being marketed globally. Frankly, Fitbit's response to this request over the last four years has been less than satisfactory, and has significantly diminished its reputation to the point where I will cannot recommend the company or its devices. Do ANY of your current devices offer kilojoules?
I get that they might have stuffed up the coding initially and never thought about the rest of the world, and that it's now too hard/expensive to update the older devices to support a simple conversion factor. However, that the same mistake has been made with the brand new Ionic, when Fitbit needs to do everything to get back on top, is beyond belief.
Unfortunately my Surge is on its last days with the band cracking issue, random lockups, and intermittent high battery drain, but thank you for at least coming clean so that I can move on and don't have to wait and see if you're going to change on this issue
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