Google Rebrands Fitbit

Google continues to subsume Fitbit into its in-house hardware brands with a second, quiet rebranding of the fitness platform. Notably, the online giant didn’t announce the changes, which are sure to worry those who believe that Google will one day lose interest in fitness trackers and start killing off the products.

As you may recall, Google acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion in January 2021 after a year-long regulatory battle in which it promised to protect the privacy of Fitbit users and maintain its open ecosystem. Since then, it announced plans to bring a unified Wear OS to Fitbit, killed desktop sync, and released several new trackers, along with its Fitbit-enabled Pixel Watch and Pixel Watch 2 smartwatches. But Google is also transitioning Fitbit users to Google accounts, and its redesigned Fitbit app was so ill-designed it didn’t even support dark mode at first. Then, last November, the firm stopped selling Fitbit trackers in 29 markets to align sales with those of Pixel-branded hardware. And Fitbit’s cofounders left Google in January, triggering more worries.

Through all of this, Google subtly worked to bring Fitbit in-house. It sells Fitbit trackers and smartwatches via its online store, and Fitbit was rebranded to “Fitbit by Google,” a moniker it’s used since August 2022 on the Fitbit website, YouTube channel, product packaging, and elsewhere. And now it’s changing again.

First noticed by 9to5Google, Fitbit is now called “Google Fitbit,” and while that seems subtle, the brand has also lost the iconic green-dotted Fitbit icon and has shifted to the same font and same capitalization Google uses with other hardware brands like Google Pixel and Google Nest. And while this hasn’t happened yet, it’s possible that the dedicated Fitbit website will disappear, as the Google Store online just renamed its “Watches” category to “Watches and Trackers” and added numerous Fitbit bands, charging cables, and other accessories that were previously not available there.

This kind of consolidation makes sense, I suppose, though I will argue that brands like Fitbit and Nest may in fact perform better without the Google association. But the January hardware reorganization that saw Fitbit’s founders exit Google did bring Fitbit, Nest, and Pixel together into a single organization. So this shift simply mirrors what already happened internally. While, unfortunately, also making it much easier for Google to kill individual Fitbit products or even product lines, like trackers. Which is, of course, the fear.