This isn’t new with digital services: imagine you signed up for Netflix because it has lots of great content you like, only to find out all that content is leaving Netflix and migrating to Paramount Plus. It’s great when new features are added with regular updates to your favorite devices, but when you’ve spent some hard-earned money on a product with a certain set of features and those features are taken away, it’s like a broken promise. Google is clearly attempting to wean people off the closed Fitbit ecosystem and onto Google’s larger Wear OS one, but for a company to retroactively change a device’s features in the hope that customers upgrade is a horrible decision that leaves long-time users stranded, with no options except to upgrade and keep their data, or take their business elsewhere. Like the Fitbit users mentioned above in the community forums, people bought devices like the Fitbit Sense and Versa 2 because they were advertised with a certain set of features. This constitutes everything loathsome about the modern tech landscape’s shady business practices. Once that happens, expect Fitbit smartwatches to effectively disappear, leaving glorified fitness trackers of various sizes and the fully ‘smart’ Pixel Watch series. Fitbit accounts will remain active until ‘early 2025’, after which you’ll need a Google account to access your fitness data. It comes as no surprise, really: anyone who’s been paying attention knows that Google was always going to begin assimilating Fitbit into its ecosystem. Fitbit’s music storage is just another casualty as Alphabet quietly guts the features it sees as cannibalistic towards its long-gestating Pixel Watch. Smart Download can automatically download songs you like, storing them on the Pixel for phone-free listening. Wear OS 3 has both Deezer and Pandora apps available for download, and you can get three months of YouTube Music Premium for free. If I cannot use it, then I would have been much better off with another device, and I would have chosen differently in the beginning.”Ĭoincidentally, you know what can store music and interact with Pandora and Deezer? Google’s new Pixel Watch – which is cited as being part of the Fitbit family despite being on Google’s Wear OS 3, rather than Fitbit OS. We’re sorry for any inconvenience! Please contact support if you need help managing your account.”Īnother said: “The only reason I have the Fitbit is for the Pandora option. This means you will no longer be able to download Pandora stations or add Deezer playlists to your device, nor will you be able to play anything that you have previously downloaded. “Pandora and Deezer will be removed as of March 31, 2023. An email sent to Fitbit users who had used Pandora or Deezer in the last six months, reportedly said the following, according to multiple corroborative posts on Reddit, the Fitbit community forums, and 9to5Google: It’s now about to kill those services as well. You can continue to play personal music stored on your watch and transfer music to your watch with the Deezer app and Pandora app.” A now-deleted message on its help page stated: “On October 13, 2022, we're removing the option to transfer playlists to your Fitbit watch through your computer. In October, Fitbit ended the ability to download music files onto smartwatches such as the Versa 3 and original Fitbit Sense. Negative headlines abounded, from the Charge 5 frequently disconnecting from Bluetooth to disastrous updates making sleep-tracking graphs harder to read and convincing users they had health issues.
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