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The Wearable Fitness Market Is Now Just Apple and Google
By acquiring Fitbit, Google is pushing into the wearables market before there’s nobody left but Apple
Fitness-tracker startups were supposed to be the next tech giants: Companies like Fitbit, Pebble, Jawbone, and Withings raised hundreds of millions of dollars in investment to build devices that log your steps, heart rate, and sleep.
But over the past decade, each of these fitness startups struggled to find a market and eventually failed. Jawbone, which built my favorite wrist wearable in 2016, was liquidated one year later. Nike, the company behind the FuelBand, fired all of its wearables staff and stopped making hardware. Pebble was acquired by Fitbit and also stopped making hardware. And this week, Fitbit, the last health-tracking startup building hardware of its own, was acquired by Google for $2.1 billion.
One primary reason for the failure of these fitness wearables was that the launch of the Apple Watch sucked all the oxygen out of the market. According to one report from technology analyst firm Canalys, Apple has the greatest fitness-tracker market share in North America at 37%, followed by Fitbit at 24%.
