Fitbit’s dying a slow death. Blame Google, which bought Fitbit in January 2021. With its own lineup of Google Pixel Watches, that’s one too many stallions in the pasture for the tech giant.
Not to mention that Google also open-sourced the Pebble OS at the start of the year, which led to a reintroduction of one of the OG smartwatch brands, Pebble. As Fitbit begins to slowly fade like the dying HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s going out with a disturbing swan song.
Fitbit users have noticed that, as of a recent update, their sleep tracking feature has been saying they’re awake a lot more during the night. People seem to think it’s a bug, but Fitbit says it’s the result of more accurate sleep tracking.
google giveth, and google taketh away
Fitbits lost Google Assistant implementation this past spring, as the Google-owned brand circles the drain on its way to tech heaven.
Users were only recently given a one-year stay of execution, as Fitbit accounts had been scheduled for deletion in late 2025 until the brand announced in May 2025 that users would have until February 2, 2026, to move their Fitbit accounts over to Google.
The idea that Fitbit is making any real changes is surprising to me. And it apparently surprised a lot of people who thought the recent reports of wakefulness during the night must be an early onset of Fitbit’s demise. Not so, says Fitbit.
“If you’ve noticed that your sleep stages, sleep time and awake time have changed recently, you’re seeing our latest improvement in action,” wrote Fitbit in an August 1 post on their community message board.
The spokesperson didn’t go into much detail on how, exactly, they upgraded their devices’ sleep tracking, only saying that “We’ve updated our tracking technology. This is to provide a more precise measurement of your sleep stages.”
Fitbit doesn’t seem to be taking its last days the way most of us would. That is to say, by moping and fixating on the coming end. It’ll instead continue to tweak its sleep tracking model.
“This is the first step in a series of upcoming improvements to improving our sleep tracking—so stay tuned to hear about these changes as soon as they happen.”
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