Google has announced Fitbit users in Europe will soon find third-party apps and watch faces are removed from their Fitbit devices.
In June 2024, third-party content will be removed from watches, whether or not you want it to stay.
This affects the Fitbit Sense and Sense 2, all members of the Versa family and the ancient Fitbit Ionic. Lower-end series like the Inspire didn’t have third-party content to begin with.
Google published this information on its support website, citing “new regulatory requirements” that impact those living in Europe, or the European Economic Area to be specific.
“Users in other countries will not be impacted,” says Google.
Some of you might be wondering how you even get third-party content on your Fitbit. It used to be one of the core pillars of Fitbit’s appeal, but this side of the ecosystem has been in decline since the company was bought by Google in 2021, a process that began in 2019
The Google site suggests European users can still download and use third-party software until June 2024, but that’s not the case for most.
Fitbit’s Versa 4 and Sense 2 launched without third-party app support at all, for example, despite the shock appearance of one such app a year ago.
In older models there were also preloaded apps for third-party services, like Spotify, but these are gone too.
This forcible removal of such software is therefore not actually all that impactful for most Fitbit users, and those apps and watch faces won’t have been updated in a long time either.
I imagine this will happen when a Fitbit watch is sync’d to the Fitbit app, prompting the removal of the third-party extras.
Nowadays, Fitbit watches feel a little more like vehicles for Fitbit Premium, a $9.99 membership service that provides some more advanced metrics, video workouts and nutrition plans, than smartwatches.
