Fitbit Coach

» see coach.fitbit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

fitbit coach was a paid app that sat on top of a device you had already paid for. that sentence is not an insult, it is the business model. it is also the reason the thing eventually had nowhere left to stand.

it began as fitstar, a san francisco company whose personal trainer app arrived in 2013 with the retired nfl tight end tony gonzalez demonstrating the exercises. the pitch was adaptive video: you rated a session as too easy or too hard, and the next one was assembled differently. i work on machine learning for a living and i would like to be careful here, because what a system like that is doing is reordering a library of clips against a difficulty score. that is real and it is useful. it is also not the intelligence the marketing implied, and the gap between those two things is most of the wearables decade in miniature.

fitbit bought fitstar in march 2015, at the point where the company had sold a great many step counters and understood that a step counter has no second act. a wristband tells you that you walked less today. it does not tell you what to do about it. buying a workout library was fitbit's answer to the most obvious complaint about its own product, and in january 2017 it shipped a redesigned fitstar that pulled your fitbit activity data in to pick the session.

by the autumn of 2017 the fitstar name was gone and it was fitbit coach, at $7.99 a month or $39.99 a year, with audio coaching added for running and an app on the ionic smartwatch. i have owned devices that counted my steps. i have never once paid a monthly fee for instructions on how to do a lunge, and i suspect the honest reason is generational rather than principled: subscription fitness is a habit that formed in a market and an age bracket next to mine rather than in it.

~ the record ~

~ the next chapter ~

what killed coach was fitbit solving the same problem twice. fitbit premium launched in 2019 as the general subscription, carrying guided programs and sleep analysis. it eventually held more than two hundred and fifty workouts, including the ones coach had been charging separately for. from that moment coach was a second checkout for a subset of what premium already sold, aimed at the same customer, from the same company.

google closed its acquisition of fitbit in january 2021, and six months later the tidying began. this is the ordinary fate of an acquired app inside an acquired company. fitstar was bought by fitbit and fitbit was bought by google, and the app that arrived in the first transaction did not survive long enough to be interesting to the second.

~ the day it died ~

on 30 july 2021 the coach mobile app stopped, and so did the website and the version running on fitbit watches. the wind-down was handled better than most. annual members were given a prorated refund of whatever they had not used and monthly members were simply not charged again. anybody holding a coach subscription without premium was offered a full free year of premium for signing up before the same date.

coach.fitbit.com now redirects into the help system, article 2279, which has itself since been swallowed into a google health support page. that is the most honest gravestone available: not a landing page pretending the product moved somewhere, just a support document answering the question you arrived with. fitstar.com resolves to nothing at all. the workouts are still in the fitbit app, unattributed, and by 2026 the whole thing had been rebranded again under google health with a coach powered by gemini, which means the word survived three owners and outlived every product it was attached to.

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