Google's Acquisition of FitBit: Boon or Doom for the fitness tracking industry?

There were rumours and you’ve heard the news: Google acquired Fitbit for a whopping $2.1 billion. With millions of user’s data now in the hands of Google, will the tech giant’s latest leap in the fitness industry put said industry in hyperdrive mode or will it allow Google to monopolize a significant chunk of the market with a Big Brother-esque control and access over users’ data? Well there are a lot of layers before coming to a conclusion and eventually only time will tell, so join us as we analyse the possible implications of one of the fitness industry’s biggest news!

Source: https://thenextweb.com/

Fitting In

When Fitbit released its first device a decade ago, little did the company know that it would grow to become synonymous with fitness trackers. With over 27 million active users and nearly 90 million devices sold worldwide as of 2019, Fitbit’s is a success story which many of its past competitors are probably envious about; Jawbone and Lark are now distant memories but were fierce competitors back in the days, even Microsoft did not bother to venture forth in the wearable fitness market after its Microsoft Band 2. This left the market to Big Tech companies like Apple, Xiaomi, Huawei and a handful of smaller companies like Fitbit and, our darling here at TMF, Pebble. 

Source: https://www.xda-developers.com/

Arguably ahead of its time with one of the best hardware and software all at an affordable price tag, Pebble was itself acquired by Fitbit in 2016. Now with Google buying Fitbit, it’s the end of the predator line with Google sitting on top of the “food chain”, making for an aptly named “wearable turducken,” as CNET’s Scott Stein puts it in a tweet. The market share is now divided between Google, Apple and a few prominent Chinese companies like Xiaomi and Huawei.

But what about Google itself in the fitness industry up to this point? Even if the company made some moves in this area, its efforts have been meagre at best. The tech giant released the fitness tracking app, Google Fit, in 2014 but users have to rely almost exclusively on third party hardware to get the most out of this app. Wear OS, Google’s tightly controlled OS for fitness wearables and smartwatches licensed to a couple of companies (as opposed to its open-source Android OS), forced successful fitness companies like Fitbit and Pebble to come up with their own OS to run their device, leaving Wear OS for premium and less affordable devices.

Source: https://wearos.google.com/

Google’s move to acquire part of Fossil, another fitness tracker company, had people speculate that we’d finally see a Made by Google smartwatch and/or fitness tracker, but to this date nothing significant has come out of this acquisition. With its competitors way ahead of itself in the wearable race (Apple Watch's market share is around 51%), Google desperately needed a head start to keep up with this race.

Catching Up

Enter Fitbit and its treasure chest filled with millions of active global users. With such a significant userbase cultivated over a decade, Google finally has the push it needed to keep up with the fitness industry race. We even think that Fitbit is one of the best in this space with great built-in functions like Coach and Relax, days of battery life and neat hardware design. By using its prowess when it comes to software and combining its existing hardware endeavours with Fossil, Google can improve on what Fitbit already offers. This somewhat aligns with Fitbit’s philosophy when considering what the company’s CEO James Park told TIME in an October interview: “The healthcare system is incredibly complex and it takes working with a lot of different big players to have a big impact. And, you know, our goal is to make this stuff that we’re working on available and accessible to as many people around the world. And we can only do that by working with the largest players in healthcare.”

Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/

With both the hardware and userbase captured from Fitbit, Google’s aim to become a leader in the fitness industry and Fitbit’s goal to make their product more accessible is now within arm’s reach. Thanks to Android’s market share, Fitbit adopters might get an edge over Apple Watch users thanks to the possibility of a plethora of connected services, NFC payments and other upcoming features that the company can include with Google’s aid in software development. Moreover, Google's Verily's Project Baseline, which has the goal of “bridging the gap between research and care”, needs reliable hardware and (a lot of) potential participants as soon as possible for its studies to gain steam and Fitbit provides just that. There’s a lot in it for Google and its willingness to shed $2.1 billion on Fitbit is understandable.

Finish Line

The question that arises with such an acquisition is as follows: what is a company that essentially survives on advertisement going to do with the newfound treasure trove that is the personal health data of millions of users collected over a decade? Does this mean that you will see ads about the local yoga coach when your Fitbit detects that your stress level is higher than usual? Or get notified about a local orthopaedic mattress store if your deep sleep drops below average?

Source: https://www.iotgadgets.com/

Such concerns have prompted Fitbit users to delete their user data or even to throw away their Fitbit device. However, that’s not going to be the case according to Google and Fitbit. “We will be transparent about the data we collect and why. We will never sell personal information to anyone. Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads,” writes Rick Osterloh, Senior Vice President, Devices & Services at Google. However, Paul Bischoff, a privacy advocate with Comparitech, tells The Guardian that we should still be wary about this acquisition when it comes to user privacy because even if users’ data will not be used for advertising, “that leaves plenty of other information for Google to gather, including users’ locations, device info, friends’ lists, messages, profile photos, participation in employee wellness programs, and usage logs”. With lack of trust in big corporations’ handling our user data, this can spell doom on the fitness tracking industry...

Now that Google occupies a significant chunk of the wearable market, other Big Tech companies like Facebook and Amazon will want their share of the cake and start making similar acquisitions soon. Such competition will help drive the fitness industry forward and if users demand more control over their private data, the companies involved will have to bend to those demands and tighten their security while delivering compelling products. This might be the boon that the fitness tracking industry needed after all…

Source: https://gearopen.com/

Whatever plans Google has in store for Fitbit remains to be seen. But with such a giant now making leaps in the wearable sector, things will start to move, and it’s not just you when your fitness tracker nudges you if you’ve been idle for too long but the industry as a whole.

Dr. Bertalan Mesko, PhD is The Medical Futurist and Director of The Medical Futurist Institute analyzing how science fiction technologies can become reality in medicine and healthcare. As a geek physician with a PhD in genomics, he is a keynote speaker and an Amazon Top 100 author.

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