How Fitbit is deliberately making products less useful

[Lucasplz]

https://youtu.be/iyWJ1yid6Xc

Video summary: 

Through your assistant, you used to be able to set timers for however long you wanted on Fitbit Sense. After the latest update, this has become harder (though still possible, as shown in the video). This shows that Fitbit was not only aware that people were setting timers for a useful length, they deliberately acted to make their product less useful to you. Fitbit doesn't care about the customers.

[Jenn2978 · Accepted solution]

So your complaining that the option you were using ...is still available...that hardly qualifies as "fitbit not caring" as things update they remove the lesser used parts of the program. Be thankful it's still in there at all. 

[Lucasplz]

This isn't something that's still there, it's a loophole that Fitbit didn't close in their coding. It's also pretty useless because you can't even see the timer progression (which you could before the update). They are removing functionality.

[Lucasplz]

Suppose someone has an illnesses and needs to take a medication every 4 hours for a few days. This person might want to rely on a timer to remind them to take their medication. Fitbit Sense won't allow that because they don't allow users to set a timer for longer than 99m59s. I personally think that's a bad deal for a product that advertises having a timer. I think it's unreasonable that timers are limited to 99m59s. 

Users could set a longer timer through the assistant, but now this has been almost entirely patched. Fitbit has mostly closed this loophole. The fact that their software engineers forgot to close a loophole (saying to the assistant to set a timer for [x] minutes/hours from now) doesn't mean that the functionality is still available. Especially when you consider you no longer even see the timer counting down when you do that (something you used to be able to do). I would argue that seeing how much time is left for your timer to go off is an important feature, one that was entirely removed. Should I be thankful for that, too?

You paid for a product that, when you purchased it, was capable of doing something. Then the company goes and tries to remove this functionality. They almost manage to do it, except for one small loophole. And you're saying I should be thankful that they forgot to patch that loophole? That's a very bad attitude. They still tried to make the product less useful. It is now not only harder to set a longer timer, but most people won't know how to do it altogether unless they spend hours looking it up.