The switch from Fitbit to Google Health was announced earlier in the month, began rolling out a few days ago as an app update, and basically completed over the weekend thanks to Fitbit Air orders arriving early. Almost everyone who uses Fitbit should now be on Google Health, assuming they’ve opened their app and gone through that simple process.
So what’s the switch been like for most? As someone who has been using the new Fitbit (now Google Health) in preview on and off for months, I don’t have many complaints. It has a slick new UI, a coach I can talk to if I want, and metrics that (to me) are more in my face and readily available. I’m also not a life-long Fitbit user either.
As far as I can tell, the dedicated Fitbit users are not at all happy. I cruised through the Fitbit subreddit last night and this morning and can’t even keep up with the number of threads that have negative titles, hundreds of upvotes, and just as many comments. This is not going over well so far.
The most noteworthy of them is one titled “Google Health Ruined Fitbit.” At the time of this post, it has over 600 upvotes and 300+ comments about the big change.
The original post talks about the tile setup at the top and not being able to scroll to see as much info. They are right that the tiles up top are a super compact version of the old Fitbit UI. They can be customized, but the process to do so is not the most intuitive. As for not scrolling, they are also correct that a lot of the scrolling experience is the Google Health app reacting to your current status rather than just giving you data. To get specific pieces of info, you may need to jump through several tabs. To get the most info, you really should customize the Health tab and hangout there.
Others in the same thread said they were cancelling their Fitbit Air order because of the new app, that they weren’t fans of the new UI (“Terrible” and “a child designed it with crayons” were descriptions), and had already switched to Garmin or Polar within recent days.
There’s also an entire thread called “New UI is terrible.” You can probably guess how it’s going. There are several suggesting the app looks like “it was designed and coded by AI,” whatever that means. For a lot of people, it’s the colors, the font, and the struggle to customize anything (again, it’s not intuitive, but you can customize some stuff).
This thread announced the “Fitbit app completely destroyed” and another said they were cancelling Fitbit Premium while looking for a Pixel Watch alternative. It’s early days, but the big freakouts are here.
If there’s anything you should read, it would be the thread titled “Beyond frustrated with the forced ‘Google Health’ update.” It has hundreds of comments and inclkudes several examples from power users who are missing features or struggling to get the new app to do what they need it to.
I’ll certainly share my own thoughts in the coming days, but reactions like the ones I’ve highlighted here are everywhere. The switch from Fitbit to Google Health is a huge change. Not only is the name changing, the app, features, and UI are too. There are new things to get used to, new things to figure out, and if something is missing, folks can decide if they want to be patient in waiting for Google to bring it back (here’s the official list of features).
Fitbit folks, we sticking around for this or looking elsewhere?
