Fitbit Force

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

~ the goodbye ~

the fitbit force was an october 2013 launch in the us at one hundred and thirty dollars. honestly, by 2013 i was a computer engineer in ankara and step-counting wristbands were not a category i had bought into. the fitbit clip-on tracker had been around since 2009 but the force was the first one of theirs with an oled screen on the wrist that could show the time. the early-wearable bet was on the wrist by then.

the device tracked steps, distance, calories, floors climbed via a small altimeter, and sleep duration. the oled screen could show the time of day and walked you between metrics with a single side button. the strap closed with a metal clasp. inside the band were a stainless steel casing, the screen, the sensors, the battery, and the adhesives that held the assembly together.

in late january 2014 user reports started piling up online. reddit threads and the fitbit community forum filled with photos of red rashes, weeping skin, and blisters on the inside of the wrist where the device sat. the consumer product safety commission opened a coordination with fitbit on 20 february 2014, and fitbit announced a voluntary refund program the same day. on 12 march the cpsc made the recall official.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it actually ended ~

the official recall covered about one million units sold in the us and around twenty-eight thousand in canada. at the time of the formal cpsc notice there were 9,900 reports of skin irritation and 250 reports of blistering. the cause was not a single thing. some users reacted to the nickel in the stainless steel casing, some reacted to the polyurethane strap, and some reacted to the adhesives bleeding through after extended wear. the fix was not a firmware update or a strap swap. it was a full unit recall.

fitbit ran the refund through their website and a 1-800 line. customers shipped the device back in a prepaid envelope and got a refund or a credit toward the next product. the force never came back. in those days. the company moved straight to the fitbit charge in late 2014, which used different strap materials and a slightly different casing alloy. the charge did not have the same problem at scale.

~ what came after ~

the force recall got watched closely by the rest of the wearable industry because it was the first big skin-contact recall in the category. jawbone had its own up wristband on the market at the same time with similar designs and quietly revised its materials after the fitbit story. nike fuelband had a separate failure path that ended its hardware business by 2014 anyway.

the force is now a small footnote in early-wearable history rather than a product anyone remembers fondly. fitbit recovered fine. the charge and then the charge hr and the alta and the blaze kept the company growing through the mid-2010s. google acquired fitbit in 2021 for two point one billion dollars (or whatever the final number was after regulatory delays). the recall episode mostly survived as an internal materials checklist for every wearable that came after.

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