Their customer service is pretty horrible, too. My Aria scale just would not connect to wifi. CS sent me the same troubleshooting info as listed on their site 3 times and then offered a replacement but refused to pay for shipping. In comparison, I had a MIO Fuse, which broke, and their CS not only mailed me a pre-paid label but even got me in direct email contact with one of their PMs to try to troubleshoot the issue.
It also took Fitbit over a quarter to launch Strava integration after announcing it, yet that feature is probably a couple days (max) of coding. The Mods in the discussion forms kept sandbagging, claiming the feature was extremely complex.
The initial step counter was a hit product with a specific niche. My impression is they've really struggled to keep up with growth and innovation in the field, and this IPO is very much an attempt at an exit of sorts.
I also question the quality of the software on their devices.
I had to return my first fitbit scale because my firewall blocked the first outbound request that the scale made (it was a new unidentified device on the network), which caused the scale to brick itself.
If the first registration request fails it does not appear to retry. Taking out the batteries had no effect.
I was stunned they hadn't caught this in product testing. Not that the first request could get blocked by an anal firewall but that a sporadic internet connection doesn't cause the device to brick.
That's a pity. I've had the opposite experience with FitBit's support, including free shipping of replacement bits to New Zealand. I was somewhat blown away by the quality of their support.
With that said, I've become less happy with their hardware over time. My One frequently resets its clock and thus miscounts steps; my Aria downgrades my network to 802.11b (but that might be fixed by getting a better router?).
I also have an Aria scale and the whole reason I bought it is the fact that I don't want to have to bother writing down the date+weight on a piece of paper in the morning (trust me I seem to fail at this basic task at 6am having tried for years). To my horror I discovered that they only save a few months (three?). Given the amount of data the device is reporting I was expecting them to effectively store all data forever. Buyer beware.
Edit: to clarify when you go to fitbit's website and you go to the device's settings it shows you all of the measurements and lets you delete some. If it has been extracted to a fitbit account then it is "saved" (testing exporting my fitbit account it does have my old weights), but for example all of the measurements of our cat+me which did not have a fitbit account were auto deleted after some time period. I wonder if you don't log into your fitbit account in less than 90 days if you would also start losing your weight history or something similar :\ Either way deleting weight data on a product whos sole purpose is keeping track of data for you is sad.
It also took Fitbit over a quarter to launch Strava integration after announcing it, yet that feature is probably a couple days (max) of coding. The Mods in the discussion forms kept sandbagging, claiming the feature was extremely complex.
The initial step counter was a hit product with a specific niche. My impression is they've really struggled to keep up with growth and innovation in the field, and this IPO is very much an attempt at an exit of sorts.