Misfit Wearables

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

~ the goodbye ~

us fitness obsessives bought misfit shines around 2013. that crowd was not mine. i was 29, in ankara, working long hours on computer vision, the kinda guy whose only step counter was the elevator. misfit launched on indiegogo in 2012 with a coin-sized aluminum disc that tracked steps without a screen, the founding team was sonny vu out of agamatrix, sridhar iyengar, and a third cofounder named john sculley, yes that john sculley.

the pitch was a tracker you would never have to charge. the shine ran on a coin cell for about six months and you tapped it twice to see a ring of leds that approximated your daily progress. you slipped the coin into a wristband, a magnetic clip, or a necklace pendant. for someone who hated the look of plastic rubber wristbands the misfit looked like jewelry first and a sensor second. fitbit and jawbone owned the screened tracker tier, misfit owned the coin-on-your-shirt tier (or whatever it was called).

the run from 2013 to 2015 was the good years. shine, then flash in 2014, then ray in 2015. then misfit shipped its own bluetooth bulb called bolt and a wireless speaker called link, because every wearable startup of that era thought they were a platform. they were not. but yeah, fossil bought the company in november 2015 for 260 million dollars and folded the team into the new fossil smartwatch division.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the fossil years ~

this part i was barely paying attention to. fossil's bet was hybrid watches: an analog watch face on top, fitness tracking inside. for a few years that was a defensible niche. by 2019 google had bought wear os and fossil had pinned its smartwatch future to it. misfit slowly became a sub-brand within fossil's hybrid line. then the company stopped making misfit-branded products in 2019 or early 2020 and the consumer site went dark pending a relaunch that never came.

fossil kept the backend running for years after the last shine left the warehouse. anyone with an old shine could still sync to the app and read history. then in may 2023 the company announced the backend would close, the misfit app would be pulled from the app store and play store. the trackers themselves still vibrate for an alarm and still count steps locally, what you lose is everything that goes through the cloud: history, goal setting, friend leaderboards, sleep graphs.

~ the day it bricked ~

gadgets and wearables covered the wind-down on may 11, 2023. wareable's substack pointed out the deeper story: fossil had spent five years tied to a google wear os roadmap that google itself kept stalling. when google finally redid wear os 3 with samsung in 2021, fossil's hardware was too far down a different fork to follow. by 2023 fossil had stopped making smartwatches entirely and was pulling the plug on every cloud service that supported them.

misfit was collateral damage in a story that was really about fossil losing the smartwatch race. the shines kept ticking on coin cells in drawers for a while longer. honest distance applies here. i never owned one. but the death pattern, a tracker bricked because a parent company sunset a backend, is the same one that took down pebble, fuelband, and jawbone before it. four dead wearable graves in one decade, each from a slightly different cause, each ending the same way.

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