Fitbit claims to be focusing on improving the app experience in order to provide its customers with the greatest fitness tools possible, and this seems to involve the discontinuation of a few functions. Open groups, as well as all Fitbit challenges and adventures, will be removed from the Google-owned fitness company’s app on March 27th. According to the corporation, these features “have limited utility,” which presumably indicates that consumers haven’t used them enough to justify their continuing development and maintenance.
Open groups, as opposed to closed groups, enable anybody in the community to join by submitting a request. Users may locate them by navigating to Groups in the app’s Community page and then looking for ones that seem like a good fit. As the pandemic lockdowns began, people asked Fitbit to make open groups simpler to form — apparently, groups created via the app are immediately turned private — and the Fitbit staff indicated they’d explore expanding the feature. Yet, it seems that they elected to eliminate all open groups instead.
Meanwhile, Fitbit challenges are events in which users may compete, such as races to see who can achieve the most steps in a day. Adventures encourage individuals to walk by unlocking virtual trails such as Yosemite Park’s Valley Loop and 180-degree views of sights that may be located along them dependent on their step count. Users who quit the app will lose any trophy or prize they received from these tasks, although they may retrieve their data by March 27th. Lastly, Fitbit Studio, its platform for generating applications and watch faces, will be discontinued, and the firm will only offer its command-line interface tools for app development in the foreseeable future.
