Garmin and Apple have the fitness market covered. Fitbit never had the hardcore fitness market Garmin executed into and Apple has always had a product that works well across the wearable and fitness. Between these two companies I can't imagine there's much of a niche Fitbit does better. On the extreme hardcore triathlon user even Garmin has taken a lot of market from Suunto and the like. I've owned a handful of Garmin devices over the years and have never considered Fitbit. Now that Google owns them my initial reaction is that Fitbit is going to be in a very confusing state for the next year and their products will fall further behind. Unless Google actually scraps what WearOS is today and goes back to the drawing board they've lost this war even to Garmin.
To me, Garmin is the only company here that does a good job with the "hardcore fitness" market, but why does that matter in the first place? The better market to compete in is the "fitness amateur" market, which I see as being many times the former in size. Fitbit competes well here, and Google has no offering to speak of. Seems like a successful diversification move for Alphabet's portfolio. I especially like what Google's software can do to improve FitBit's offering by leveraging AI.
I think the point you're missing is everyone levels up. Even amateur fitness users want a better fitness wearable. Which is why Garmin and Apple have the lion's share of the market. Fitbit is still seen as a step tracker level device, even if they do more. Garmin wearables are laser focused to the workout market and most buyers seem to lust over the idea of needing a more capable fitness device. Garmin and Apple both cover "fitness amateur" in spades but do an upsell far better.
With regard to AI, I'm not trying to be flippant but, those users don't care. No amateur fitness users would even understand how that would apply and likely be less to care than selling predictive analysis to those working out who legitimately track vitals and are trying to shave seconds.
Apple Watch battery lasts a day at most. My Fitbit can go without a charge for 6 days. Fitbit offers sleep tracking.. Apple Watch doesn’t natively, and even if it did, you still have to charge it at night. Fitbits are more minimalistic. They’re so nice. I don’t want a Garmin wearable. A lot of people who use Fitbits don’t use them for the fitness aspect. We use them to avoid the sedentary lifestyle by viewing our steps, and occasionally going on a run. I hope Google doesn’t ruin Fitbit. But judging by their past moves, my Charge 3 will be useless in a matter of 2-3 years
I much prefer my Apple Watch over my shitty fitbit to be honest. Charging isn’t an issue. I only charge it in the morning when I’m getting ready and that’s enough to last me the whole day and through the night.
All that as well as the great GPS capability. I have the Fitbit Ionic and start the Walk exercise when bushwalking ( hiking). It produces very accurate track logs that I can use for mapping when I return. It does consume more battery but far less than high rate logging on the phone
This, I want the basics, not another phone on my wrist. The charge 3 lasts me 10 days and charges in about 15 minutes. I don't want another device to charge daily.
This and the casual smartwatch market where FitBit's versa already sells great (even though it's not great at all). Google's offerings here are sparse, littered with confusing options and half-assed design. A cohesive pixel/Fitbit product can help create a proper Anti-Apple Watch product.
> "fitness amateur" market ... Fitbit competes well here
I'm not so sure about that.
For simple activity monitoring by way of step counting, movement time, sleep time, and similar simple metrics, there is a lot of competition. This isn't just from the extremely cheap (but probably not very good) options, there are several devices out there at about half the price of FitBit's cheapest that seem to do the job just as well (caveat: I'm basing this mainly on anecdotal evidence from friends/family and online).
For very little more than their cheapest watch & step-counter you can get a TomTom sports watch which has built-in GPS for accurate run/cycle/other tracking, breadcrumb mapping, and so on. The price difference for adding a wrist-based heard-rate monitor is about the same in both ranges.
Moving away from the casual fitness market towards people like me[†], their only GPS capable device[‡] costs more than Garmin's 235 which is a more capable device, more than twice the price of the aforementioned TomTom units, in fact you can usually get a Fenix 3 for the same price as the Ioinc, and there are a couple of other well regarded competitors with similar feature sets at that sort of price level too.
Their key advantage is name recognition, at the casual end of the market at least, though that doesn't necessarily help. People often call cheap-n-dirty activity trackers "cheap fitbits" rather than an activity tracker, watch, or other name including the products official name, but they still buy them instead of the actual fitbit. They did in the past seem to have that part of the market cornered, but seem to have let it slip considerably in recent years.
(NOTE: I'm in the UK. Relative pricing of manufacturers/models may differ in different markets.)
[†] I'm a recreational runner, far from the top of any particular class though in recent years I've knocked of a couple road marathons and multi-day trail challenges so I consider myself to be good at putting one foot in front of the other without tripping over either!
[‡] I generally discount phone-based GPS tracking by wrist-mounted devices due to the battery drain on the phone, and I never found it terribly reliable though that may have improved since
My Garmin 935 is waterproof, has an always on display, shows smartphone notifications, charges once a week, and has worked for over a year. If apple or Fitbit had this, I’d go back. Had multiple fit bits and they all broke in 6 months. Had an Apple Watch, but it needed to be charged every day, wasn’t waterproof, and display turned off. Apple has improved on 2 of those but it still needs every day charging.
I would put garmin last software, but the other hardware features more than make up for it.
Ex Garmin employee:
The amount of 1st party software in those watches is astounding. And it almost all gets processed on-watch.
The 3rd party app support is laughably poor, but the APIs are there. ConnectIQ apps are written in their own language (MonkeyC, which is kinda hard to use), which hinders adoption, and are generally slow and feature-poor.
But the good thing for Garmin is that the 1st party software more than makes up for the lack of 3rd party support. The music-enabled watches (eg FR645) have Spotify support, GPS, and Bluetooth music, last for an eon, and are hardy as all hell.
Seriously, I know that these always-on displays don't look as nice as an LCD, but I value battery life more. If there were WearOS device that had this type of display to make them last longer than a day or two I'd consider it, mostly for Google Pay and the ability to use Spotify without my phone.
Plus it really sucks to wait for the lag on wrist-raise (or the false alarms) to be able to tell the time. With the Garmin, glance at it to get the time; no wrist movement foppery. Edit: BTW, some of the WearOS watches now have effectively 2 displays: a always-on lcd with great battery life for the basics and the fancy backlit lcd underneath for everything else: one example is Mobvoi, which has funding from Google and thus hopefully isn't fly-by-night. Edit2: https://wearos.google.com/#find-your-watch .
I have seen a lot more Fitbits then Garmins or Apple Watches. I would argue that the hardcore market, while the most loyal, isn't the largest revenue generator. It's everyone who wants something "smart" without breaking the bank (or tied to iOS).
I wouldn’t have bought an Apple Watch even if I wanted to spend the extra money. Battery life, minimal build, and sleep tracking are the selling points for many people.
Google needs a proper smartphone-like smartwatch and they needed a cheap buy to speed up the dev process. They don't need the Garmin market because they want a smartwatch on every person and not on every athletic person. I was always hoping smart glasses come after smart phones but I guess these are even smaller and need even more time than watches to become efficient enough to cover for the small battery.
If this is really the driver behind Google buying them, what do you think are the odds that most - if not all - of the non-watch FitBit products are eventually discontinued?
That's how they built up a following, with devices that were inexpensive, and did a few things well, but given the current environment, Google doesn't seem like they are interested in that market.
I think there's an enormous market for <=~$100 wearables that are primarily positioned as health trackers. Among other things, many wellness programs partner with Fitbit as a device provider. The first mover advantage for Fitbit also carries over into their existing, very expansive, partner ecosystem. This "health tracker" market is far larger market than the one for fully functional smart watches with 1-2 day batteries.
I'm currently using a Mi Band 3 with Gadgetbridge on Android just because I know it doesn't phone home, last several days and gather enough data for what I'm doing. Oh and seeing notifications without pulling my phone out of my pocket is a big reason why I wear one.
I'd be willing to try a fitbit if they had a daylight-readable smart watch. I haven't gotten around to getting a Garmin, but last I checked they were the only watch since pebble with a daylight-readable screen--and they support heart-rate. Google has a chance to do better with App integration.
$99? A brand new Garmin Vivofit 4 which has an always on display and a year of battery life is $79.99 USD. It's the low margin segment of the space and that's where Fitbit put all their eggs. Fitbit didn't really invest in anything behind low-end fitness tracking well. They tried, but people buy other products now. They want heart rate, they want GPS, they want PulseOx and ECG features and will pay for them. Regardless of whether or not they need them.
They’re starting to put some of their data behind a monthly subscription, especially around sleep.
A coworker recommended I look into buying one, but as soon as I saw that I needed to pay $x per month to see data they were already capturing, I immediately passed.
And why wouldn’t they just buy a $199 Apple Watch Series 3? How many people are both into fitness and do price conscience that they won’t spend an extra $100.
If you have an Android, or even want the option of an Android in the future.
I wish Apple would want some of their stuff cross-platform - I don't like the all or nothing nature of the Apple ecosystem (I consider 'exclusives' to be anti-consumer in general).
Honestly, I think an Apple Watch (maybe the very affordable Series 3?) would be your best and most comfortable option. You can have your activites tracked by Apple's own first-party Activity app, which is likely the most privacy-conscious option.
I use an Apple Watch for cycling and several other activites. It isn't a necessity at all and one could debate the purchase for ages, but once you start using it you probably wouldn't want to miss all those small and frequent conveniences it provides in addition to the rock solid activity tracking.
