Fitbit is no longer selling its products in several countries spanning Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
The news, first spotted by Android Authority, was confirmed on two separate Fitbit support pages. The official list of confirmed countries affected includes Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hong Kong, Hungary, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Thailand. More vaguely, the support pages say Fitbit will also stop selling products in “the broader Latin American countries.”
South Africa is also on the list, per an interview with South African publication TechCentral. Google, which finished its acquisition of Fitbit in early 2021, told the publication that it has decided to stop selling both Fitbit and Nest products in “select countries” to “align our hardware portfolio to map closer to Pixel’s regional availability.” We’ve reached out to Google and Fitbit for further comment but did not immediately receive a response.
Despite no longer making products available in certain countries, Fitbit did say existing customers would still receive support in the way of software releases, security updates, warranty fulfillments, and customer support. Despite that pledge, there was at least one inconvenient hurdle for Premium subscribers. Fitbit Premium auto-renewals stopped as of August 11th in Asia and October 23rd in Europe. Those affected were given a free month of Premium before being reverted back to the basic plan — though confusingly, Fitbit said they could resubscribe to regain access to Premium features.
All in all, this is yet another growing pain in the Google-Fitbit integration. Fitbit has long been a global brand, even though it’s struggled since smartwatches started outpacing fitness trackers in popularity. You’d think this would be a way for Google to maintain that global customer base. However, if it is indeed the case that Google is trying to scale down Fitbit to Pixel availability, it seems to be another sign of which lineup it sees as leading its wearable ambitions and resources. Given Pixel’s more limited global availability, it’s disappointing to see.
