What's Better (and Worse) in Fitbit's New App Preview

I’ve been using Fitbit’s revamped app, currently in “public preview” mode for adult Android users in the United States. While I like the simplified aesthetic, its functionality seems to center around the questionable AI that gave me so many wrong and confusing answers. Let me take you on a tour of where the new app has improved, where it’s falling short, and what’s still missing. 

Better: cardio load and key metrics are easy to read

The top few metrics on the home screen have always been configurable, but I find the new version is even more readable than the old one. You get three “focus metrics” on the right hand side, and a big donut shape giving your progress toward your cardio load. 

Fitbit’s current app is on the left; the updated preview version is on the right.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Fitbit

Measuring cardio load as progress toward a weekly goal is a welcome change; previously, cardio load was a daily measure that often didn’t correspond to reality. There’s a downside to the new view, though: in the old version of the app, you could turn off the recommendations or hide them. In this version, there’s no way I could find to remove that metric from the top of your screen.

Better: separate tabs for fitness, sleep, and health

What you see on the Fitness, Sleep, and Health tabs.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Fitbit

Finding any specific data in the old Fitbit app always meant scrolling through a CVS receipt-length list of things you weren’t looking for. Items tended to be grouped, which helped a little, but ultimately some things need more space than the little card they were stuffed into. You couldn’t find your recent workouts without guessing on which tile to tap—turns out it’s Exercise Days (but not Cardio Load or Active Zone Minutes).

But now, you just tap on the Fitness icon at the bottom, and there everything is! My exercise days and weekly cardio are there, then a listing of upcoming workouts, and then my recent activities. I can log a manual activity right from this screen. Perfect. (The button doesn’t seem to be working right now, but hey, it’s a beta. I can appreciate the idea.) 

Same goes for the Sleep tab. Right up top there’s a trend insight (“Your steps linked [sic] to better sleep quality”) and then I get my graph of sleep stages, and a list of “key metrics” like when I went to bed and how much time in bed was spent awake. 

The Health tab gives my vitals, like my resting heart rate and HRV. If I scroll down, I can set up alerts, update my profile, and the “coach notes” that the AI has written down about me. For example, I see “wants low reps and heavy weights” and “hates lunges.” 

Worse: glitches galore

I know it’s a beta, but things seem really rough. My workout from two days ago is listed as “upcoming,” and the app crashes when I try to mark it as completed. The old Fitbit app says that my high and low heart rate notifications are “on & checking” but the new app says I still need to set them up. 

Some of the AI conversations fail to load at all. When they do, often the bot tells me it doesn’t have access to the information I’m asking about, or it says that “internally” it sees something different than what I’m seeing in the main screens of the app. The team has a lot to fix before these features are ready for widespread use.

Worse: structured data views are replaced with AI conversations

Humans invented graphs, charts, and other means of data presentation because these are easy to scan and interpret at a glance. The new Fitbit app can generate some charts (great!) but tends to present these as little cards to illustrate insights from the AI bot. 

To see more data, you’d think you could tap on a button or card about a recent run to get your lap times, running dynamics, and other information. But that doesn’t seem to be an option. Instead, I get a “continue conversation” button that seems to want to feed a screenshot of the AI output back into the AI bot. 

I’ve already written about some of the problems I’ve had conversing with the AI bot, so I won’t rehash those issues here. (It hallucinates in ways that are sometimes hilarious and often frustrating.) But even if the AI was as intelligent as it’s supposed to be, this would still be a major issue. The AI responses are slow, and I can’t always get the bot to give a straight answer to my questions. 

In short, it seems like the app’s designers said “we’ll have the AI handle it” anytime they weren’t sure how to build a feature. So the app feels like a mere wrapper around the bot, and the bot is just not the right tool for all those jobs. 

Missing: nutrition, menstrual health, and more

Google says that it hasn’t ported all the Fitbit app’s features to the new preview. When I asked about these limitations by email, the response I got was that “As a preview, the service is not yet feature-complete and lacks several functionalities to focus testing on the core AI coaching experience.” 

A full list of missing features is available from this Fitbit forum post. They include: 

• Nutrition tracking

• Hydration tracking

• Menstrual health

• Community features

• Badges

• Social media sharing

• Heart rate zone analysis for workouts

• Running analytics for Pixel Watch 3 and 4 users (other devices don’t provide this data)

• Syncing data from Aria Air smart scales

The post also notes that the AI coach treats certain subjects as off-limits for the moment, including those related to weight, body fat, running distance, and heart health measurements like ECG and irregular rhythm notifications.

Original Source: https://lifehacker.com/health/fitbit-new-app-preview-impressions?utm_medium=RSS