Fitbit: Several smartwatches will lose important functions from the end of March

Fitbit is shutting down a key feature for several smartwatches starting March 31, 2023. Fitbit Sense, Versa 2 and Versa 3 will lose the ability to stream music from Pandora and Deezer.

Fitbit Sense, Versa 2 and Versa 3 lose feature

Fitbit is curtailing the functionality of its Fitbit Sense, Versa 2 and Versa 3 (our review) smartwatches starting March 31, 2023. The apps of the music streaming providers Pandora and Deezer will be completely removed and can no longer be used, and offline music downloads will also no longer be possible.

This will even affect playlists and stations (in the case of Pandora) that have already been downloaded and stored on the Fitbit devices. The provider does not provide a reason for removing these features.

However, this naturally causes annoyance within the community. Also because the provider only communicated this in an email to existing customers and not publicly. Fitbit had already removed the option of transferring one’s own music to the smartwatches last year.

Many users are dismayed. After the removal of own music now also no music streaming and no offline use? “If I can’t use this, then I would have been better off with another device and I would have chosen differently from the start,” lindsaygard writes in the Fitbit forum.

It is unclear whether the curtailment of the feature set is possibly related to the Google Pixel Watch. Perhaps Google, which has already owned Fitbit for years, wants to make its own smartwatches less attractive to boost (sluggish) sales of its own device.

Fitbit, already owned by Google for two years, is responsible for the Pixel Watch’s health and fitness features. Therefore, the Google Pixel Watch relies on detailed fitness tracking and is supposed to offer the most accurate heart rate measurement ever in a Fitbit tracker thanks to machine learning (ML) and a special optimization.