There is no doubt that Fitbit still has enormous brand recognition. Whether or not the company’s current offerings are your best option is certainly debatable, but the make carries a lot of weight. Well, who better to potentially start killing it off than Google? The company certainly has a dark track record of mishandling brands and products.
The situation might not be too bad at the moment, though. We are certainly only piecing clues together, and there is no formal announcement yet. Still, people noticed that on the software side of things, in some markets (mostly European), on the Google Play Store, there have been references to “Google Health Premium” in relation to purchasing Pixel Watch or Fitbit devices. Naturally, that has led to speculation that Google is planning to move all of the Fitbit software bits (no pun intended) under the Google Health umbrella. There is even a new Google Health logo “leak” to potentially back that restructuring theory up. It looks like a paint-stroke heart icon finished in the recognizable Google gradient color scheme.
We also have an interesting Apple App Store listing with all the in-app purchases to investigate. It clearly shows “Google Health Premium” options, priced the same as the Fitbit ones. Though it’s unclear whether these are final prices, since most of these early “leaks” have been removed from app stores since. In any case, rebranding or not, this suggests that the Google Health Premium/Fitbit Premium plans will remain separate from Google’s One or AI Pro/Ultra subscription bundles. Fitbit Premium is currently only bundled as a perk in the Google general subscription in the UK, and that is yet to expand to other markets.
However, it might not be all doom and gloom for the legendary Fitbit brand. As far as we currently know, the company’s next display-less fitness tracker will be called the Google Fitbit Air instead of using Pixel branding. Hopefully, that suggests that Google will keep the Fitbit branding for hardware, at least for now.