I don't need my Fitbit anymore

Originally published on Tumblr.

After wearing it religiously for a year, I’ve given it up. For a year, I was only separate from my Fitbit when I slept, swam, and showered. I always knew how many steps I’d taken, how may stairs I’d climbed, how many calories I’d eaten, and how many I’d burned. I lost weight, and I understood why. I gained weight, and I understood why. I learned a lot.

But in the end, I gave it up because it stopped teaching me anything new. It stopped teaching me anything new because the software never improved. This is odd. This is odd because Fitbit is one of the first companies that understood the power of marrying sensors and cloud-based software.

A pedometer produces a number. A scale produces a number. The better versions produce a few numbers, every day. In isolation those numbers aren’t so interesting, but their relationships are.

Of course, you don’t need fancy cloud-based software to manipulate and show those relationships. A paper, or a spreadsheet will do. My father has recorded his weight for three years on his bathroom door. So it’s not impossible. It’s just a lot more convenient when the whole loop is automated. That’s why I was so excited when I started using my Fitbit.

I tracked my steps and my calories. The calorie counting module kind of sucked at first. But I wasn’t too worried about it, because I knew Fitbit would fix it. But I was wrong. They never did. In a year, they made a few cosmetic changes, but nothing that made the user’s job any easier. The exercise and weight plotting modules were OK, but they never got better. They never made it easy for me to annotate or correlate all those numbers.

Instead of worrying about the software, Fitbit produced new versions of their hardware, none of which were significantly better than the last.

The oddest thing about the Fitbit software is that it didn’t evolved beyond weight loss. Once I’d hit my goal weight, my only option was to enter another goal weight, or I had no goal. But I didn’t want to lose weight forever. I wanted to get to a certain weight, and then stick to it by living a healthy lifestyle. It turns out I didn’t need Fitbit for that. I just needed a routine, and good mapping software.

I didn’t need Fitbit because, after a year, I got pretty good at knowing how much I walked. And over that same year I learned that the easiest way to make my steps was to walk – instead of drive or bike – whenever my destination was less than 30 minutes away. To figure that out, I just need Google Maps.

So what would have kept me going? Another goal. Better analytics. And better calorie-tracking. Fitbit didn’t need to improve the hardware for that.

I hesitated to write this post, because I’m sympathetic to Fitbit. I genuinely like what they’ve done. In fact, I admire them immensely for what they’ve done. They’ve defined a new category of sensory software that is in the process of changing our world. I mean it. Unfortunately, I don’t think they’ve taken the time to understand why they’ve been so influential. Because of them, hundreds of hardware companies have been funded, and the “Internet of Things” is part of our vocabulary.

I’m also sympathetic because I run a software company. I know how hard it is to add features while scaling and stabilizing a platform. I also know that Fitbit makes its money by selling hardware, not software. But that’s wrong. They’re in a no man’s land. They’ll never be able to out-compete big companies like Apple and Samsung on the hardware front, and most companies of that ilk haven’t even joined the battle. And they’re leaving themselves open to having their software leapfrogged by a small group of smart people. If they don’t build that barrier, they’ll soon have nothing to defend. The Fitbit hardware was necessary to jump-start the space, but once it did that, Fitbit should have started behaving like a software company.

Of course, it’s easy for me to say this. I’m an outsider. I’m not running the company, and I’m not investing in it. But I was a client, and a very enthusiastic one. Almost my entire circle of friends and co-workers wears a Fitbit because of me, and I’ve sold quite a few Aria scales. Despite that, I found it very easy to stop monitoring myself. That shouldn’t have been the case.

I think it’s clear how this story will unfold. Before long we’ll be attaching and then embedding these sensors. And we’re very quickly going to cross the line from healthy habit to medical monitoring. The hardware will be incidental. It will be free. The data will be portable. The only thing that will matter is the software.