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Fitbit is now officially part of Google

blog.fitbit.com

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Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#301

Post by nradov »

tomComb wrote: post #93

I'm sure the sentiment here will be very much against this acquisition, but keep in mind that Fitbit was getting killed and would likely have gone out of business without this. It is tough for a company like Fitbit to compete with Apple & Samsung. This should lead to more competition by making it possible for Fitbit to compete with Apple. If it doesn't then the acquisition was a failure for Google anyway - Fitbit's c…

It wasn't just Apple and Samsung that were killing Fitbit. Garmin also took a lot of the fitness market.

Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#302

Post by Marsymars »

thenewwazoo wrote: post #98
Dig1t wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why it's difficult for them to compete with Apple and Samsung isn't readily apparent to me. There still seems to be a large hole in the smartwatch market for a GOOD Android-compatible smartwatch. There are a lot of options, but, to me, none of them are as polished or feature-heavy as the Apple Watch. It doesn't seem that one of these companies would need access to any special internal APIs or anything to b…

> There still seems to be a large hole in the smartwatch market for a GOOD Android-compatible smartwatch. In order for there to be a market, both sides have to exist: sellers and buyers . I'm not convinced Android users have the appetite for multi-hundred-dollar accessories the same way Apple users do, and given Apple's engineering skill and vertical integration, nobody is going to sell a smartwatch that's as good fo…

I’d buy the top-end Apple Watch today if it was compatible with my Android phone; as-is, the slate of compatible watches are too poor for me to bother with any of them.

Though, I’m one person, so that doesn’t invalidate your point.

Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#303

Post by Marsymars »

JshWright wrote: post #173
snowwolf wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The killer feature for me which lead me to me switching away was Fitbit Pay. They just don't have the take up by banks that the competition (Apple and Samsung) have. Maybe that would have changed, but if they integrate Google Pay instead, I may switch back.

I much prefer contactless payment with my phone anyway. I usually find it very awkward trying to position my wrist near the NFC reader on the terminal.

I’ve always thought they should put the NFC chip on the bottom of the wrist rather than on the top - that seems like a much less awkward position.

Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#304

Post by nradov »

j0ba wrote: post #115
tomComb wrote: post #93

I'm sure the sentiment here will be very much against this acquisition, but keep in mind that Fitbit was getting killed and would likely have gone out of business without this. It is tough for a company like Fitbit to compete with Apple & Samsung. This should lead to more competition by making it possible for Fitbit to compete with Apple. If it doesn't then the acquisition was a failure for Google anyway - Fitbit's c…

> Fitbit was getting killed and would likely have gone out of business If this is a reason for acquisition, then why wouldn't G*gle wait until they were "killed" so they could come in and buy their business for pennies on the dollar? We're fast approaching a dystopian Snow Crash world of all-powerful corporations, and you people are cheering it along. How can these both be true? - it's bad all US legacy media is owne…

Fitbit is able to export the semi-open FIT file data format.

https://www.thisisant.com/

Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#305

Post by nradov »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #123
j0ba wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fitbit was getting killed and would likely have gone out of business If this is a reason for acquisition, then why wouldn't G*gle wait until they were "killed" so they could come in and buy their business for pennies on the dollar? We're fast approaching a dystopian Snow Crash world of all-powerful corporations, and you people are cheering it along. How can these both be true? - it's bad all US legacy media is owne…

>If this is a reason for acquisition, then why wouldn't G*gle wait until they were "killed" so they could come in and buy their business for pennies on the dollar? Because what Google wants to buy is their marketshare and existing userbase. I very much doubt fitbit has any tech or products google couldn't make themselves in a few months. The longer fitbit sucks compared to their competition the lower that becomes.

Google also wanted the Fitbit patents for IP litigation protection.

Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#308

Post by lukeschlather »

godshatter wrote: post #279
m463 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like ANY device or peripheral - the data is more valuable that anything else. On acquisition - the exit strategy is to have a pile of data. I think regulation is the only way to change this because it's a gravy train.

I would pay more for a device that didn't save to the cloud and only saved locally but could still give you nice graphs and whatnot in an old-fashioned desktop program. They can have a website that you can upload to that makes things visible to your friends, as long as it's opt-in only. I wouldn't use it because I wouldn't trust it, though. This sort of thing is as dead as a doornail, unfortunately.

With Garmin watches you don't have to pair it to a phone or set up Wifi. You can just plug it into your computer and download the data. There exist a number of open source tools. I've only used GPXSee for looking at the GPS data, which actually let me see "correct" swimming distance data where Garmin was using some algorithm that didn't make any sense.

I mostly use the web ui but loading the data into one of the open source offline tools is on my to-do list. There's actually some analytics/reports I want to generate that Garmin doesn't provide, so I might end up doing it purely to write some reports.

(Although the peace of mind I would get knowing that I could pull the plug on my Garmin account whenever I want would be nice.)

Though it isn't perfect. When Garmin had the outage last year I unpaired my phone which actually reset some of the configuration I had done on the watch, which was really annoying.

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