I love walking.

I always have.

And I do a fair amount of it.

When I’m outside the city, I love hiking (aka - walking over rocks and branches).

With traffic the way it is in Toronto and the general state of Toronto’s transit system, I prefer to walk or bike to most places most of the time, when time allows and weather permits.

When time doesn’t allow, and weather doesn’t permit, Uber gets my dollars.

When I’m alone, I make weird choices like parking unreasonably far from an entrance door so I can get extra steps in.

I’ve participated in walk-a-thons for charities.

I’ve stepped up in corporate walking competitions.

I am a big fan of walking meetings, both in person and over the phone.

Walk-and-talk one-on-ones became commonplace in my final years at Google.

For about the last decade and a half, because of my walking obsession, I’ve used some sort of step-counting fitness tracker.

I don’t know what level of intentionally designed, engineered obsolescence might be built into fitness devices.

But I do know I kill them and buy a new one every twelve to eighteen months.

Over the years, I’ve had several step-tracking devices of different makes, models, and form factors.

And among them all, I really loved my Jawbone UP24.

It tracked steps.

It was functional.

It was relatively inexpensive to replace when it died.

And it wasn’t trying to be a watch, so it made it easy to wear a regular watch too.

Jawbone stopped making and selling fitness trackers in 2016.

Short on cash, the company failed to pay key partners and agencies that same year.

And in July 2017, the remaining bits of Jawbone were liquidated and sold for parts.

After my final Jawbone tracker died, I made the jump to Fitbit.

Fitbit didn’t offer nearly as elegant a set of devices, but they did provide a bunch of new capabilities that Jawbone didn’t.

Most notably, sleep tracking and heart rate monitoring came standard in the Fitbit.

Unlike my Jawbone, the Fitbit, in addition to tracking fitness, was also really trying to be a watch.

As a result, I haven’t worn any of my 10+ watches in nearly a decade.

And that’s okay, because I’ve grown to love my Fitbit too, for all the things it does better than my other devices.

I’ve been so “all in” on Fitbit that I even tried to convert my entire family to the device.

The teenager wasn’t into it. Trying to keep his phone charged was a challenge enough. Trying to also keep a Fitbit charged was too far afield.

But my wife converted. She’s part of the Fitbit faithful.

For years now, a normal morning conversation over coffee has included discussions about sleep duration and sleep score.

Thank you, Fitbit.

In 2021, Google bought Fitbit.

Fitbit owners, myself included, got concerned.

How did Fitbit fit into Google’s watch, data collection, and fitness app ecosystem? Would it get to stand alone? Would it remain mostly untouched?

But new, kinda cool functionality came with the Google mothership’s oversight.

There were some nifty YouTube controls that let you manage your YouTube music app without having to whip out and unlock your phone.

There was a kinda useful integration with Google Maps that provided vibrating turn-by-turn assisted navigation when walking to new or unfamiliar places.

Fitbit under Google was okay, for a while.

Google’s inevitable annexation and rebuilding of Fitbit was quietly happening somewhere in the bowels of its Mountain View headquarters.

Earlier this month, Fitbit’s app experience completely changed.

It’s now Google Health.

The user experience is radically different.

The calculations for things like Sleep Score appear to be different and more elusive as well. It is more common to get a “no data” or “sleep score unavailable” type message in the morning.

They also announced a new device, the Fitbit Air.

The Air is designed to be a cheaper alternative to the Whoop band. The Whoop faithful are a dedicated bunch. I imagine the cheaper price point Google is teasing people with will make a bunch of folks convert.

But that’s not all, Google drenched Fitbit in AI.

The new AI Fitbit app is, in a word, annoying.

It is fair to say that I don’t sleep well. I never have.

I don’t “stay up late” the way I did when I was younger. But it’s not uncommon for me to walk up in the middle of the night and work or play video games for hours when I should really otherwise be sleeping.

My walking pattern is also inconsistent. Many days, I will walk well over 10,000 steps.

Other days, I’m sitting down a lot and working away in front of screens, and end the day with only about 5,000 to 6,000 steps.

I know these things about myself.

And it was kinda a big deal when I just accepted that this was the way it was and that was just fine.

No judgement.

But Fitbit has other ideas.

The layering of artificial intelligence into Fitbit is both an impressive technical feat and a frustratingly unnecessary feature addition.

Who asked for this crap?

What’s become clear in the last week, Fitbit knows too much about me.

The AI is overtly pushy and judgmental.

It makes comments about my inconsistent walking pattern and asks if I’m “already done for the night”.

It describes my sleep as “broken” or “limited” or “excessive”.

On a recent overnight flight to Calgary, the device disclosed that it knew I was in Calgary and that I should take advantage of the local sunny weather.

Kinda cool. Kinda creepy.

I don’t like it.

My Jawbone never judged me.

And it never disclosed that it knew my location. But it probably did know my location.

I love technology.

I’m an overt and self-disclosed nerd.

And I use a lot of AI tools all the time when I’m sitting at my desk, with my Fitbit judging my sedentary work-life style.

In some ways, this new Fitbit app experience was built for people like me.

And I could probably really use it if I embraced it.

But the conversational nature of this app and the “what it actually says” in those conversations has already turned me off.

As we build more AI integrations into things, companies and their product teams should be more mindful of how these experiences will be received.

Spoiler alert, likely not to be received well.

Maybe we don’t need artificial intelligence layered into every piece of tech we own.

Maybe my Fitbit was (nearly) perfect the way it was.

Google probably is already aware that my Amazon search history now includes “alternatives to Fitbit”.

If they didn’t know, they know now.

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