The change may seem slight, but it is not trivial. A simple visit to the commercial portal of Fitbit, a brand of connected watches and activity trackers in the fold of Google, signals that its identity is increasingly dissolving into that of Mountain View. Instead of the mention “Fitbit by Google”, visible a few days ago, we now find the Google Fitbit brand, as noted 9to5Google, placing the American giant above the sports firm. This discreet rebranding also affects the font used to designate this “new” brand: it is that of Google (aka Google Sans) which is now used.
This modification is part of a more global trend, since we see that all Fitbit products are now included in the Google Store in the Watches category, which until now only included Pixel Watches. The brand’s American portal shows this change more clearly, since it renames its “Watches” section to “Watches & Trackers”, expressly for Fitbit products. If the store in the colors of the sports brand still exists, we can logically fear its imminent dissolution… The reorganization of the Products and Services division within Google, which since January has mixed the Pixel Nest and Fitbit teams, and has accompanied by the departure of James Park and Eric Friedman, historic pillars of Fitbit, opened the door to this type of change.
The acquisition of Fitbit, which completes a wave of big-budget buyouts marked by that of Nest in 2014 (3.2 billion dollars), actually dates from the end of 2019. Mountain View then spent some 2.1 billion dollars to acquire the company specializing in sports and health monitoring, and had completed the acquisition in January 2021. Since then, its technologies have been used within its own devices, since the Pixel Watch watches first and second generation are accompanied by the Fitbit Premium application, which allows you to benefit from a wide range of personal data. We also note that the latest Fitbit-branded watches (the Sense 2 and Versa 2) date from September 2022, and that only one tracker – a Charge 6 which does not compete with the Pixel Watch – has been announced since that date.