Fitbit Turns Off Web Community Features; Disgruntled Users Migrate to Count.It

The following message came in yesterday on the Count.It help hotline:

You will probably see a large number of people migrating here from the closed Fitbit web-based activity groups

Naturally, we followed up. It seems Fitbit has turned off its web-based “activity groups” platform, and is redirecting users to its “in app” community. This announcement was posted to the Fitbit community site without fanfare on June 13th, and it seems some users felt left in the lurch:

A lot of people lost years of conversations, lost many casual friends (as opposed friended friends), and all leaderboards vanished in the middle of the month — invested corporate programs as well as individual users quite upset. I can see business reasons, operating in the red for a few years, but the way it was done was horrible.

According to Fitbit, however, there’s nothing to see here: “Our enhanced community features within the Fitbit mobile app,” they wrote, “provide users with a significantly better experience by allowing them to access fitness-related news and local events, connect and message with friends, discover public groups of like-minded individuals, and create their own private groups.” That all sounds reasonable, but our source wasn’t buying:

The claim of a better experience in the Mobile App is not true neither from
a social nor fitness perspective: The Apps offer a weekly leaderboard of
steps, that’s it. The web-based groups had expanded leaderboards with
steps, distance, active minutes, daily averages for all of these, running
weeks and calendar months and archiving of last months data. The Apps have
a single threaded bulletin board — mostly filled with click and post ego
shots — impossible to carry on a meaningful conversation or find older
entries. The web groups have a forum structure with individually titled
subject threads. Information retrievable for years (maybe Fitbit didn’t
like that)…

We can imagine the argument in favor of consolidation. Both in style and substance, however, the move suggests that Fitbit is not focused on building out its consumer-facing community. Perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise. The company is fighting for its life in the smartwatch business against the likes of Apple, Samsung, Garmin and others, and the going is tough: Fitbit stock is trading around $4.50, down from close to $50 in the heady days following its IPO almost exactly four years ago.

And, while Fitbit’s revenues haver been up over the last three quarters, it lost nearly $80 million in the first quarter of 2019. Poor stock performance and heavy losses don’t make for happy times, and the company must be in crisis mode, determined to jettison any ballast that might be keeping them down.

We like Fitbit, and many of our users use and love Fitbit devices. So, we’re rooting for the company and hope it can turn the ship around.

Meantime, however, we’re happy to put out rescue boats for all the people who get thrown overboard in the process.