A few weeks ago, Google Fit received a redesign for Android and iOS that brought improved sleep tracking and more in-depth information. Unfortunately, with that redesign, they got rid of advanced strength training repetition tracking and you can see by reading the replies to the tweet below that people are not happy.
While I hardly ever used the feature, I did enjoy it. It was better, in theory, to track your workout while you were doing it and it was pretty smart too. Using the gyroscope in my Wear OS watch, it was able to (mostly) accurately predict what exercise I was doing. It was honestly pretty magical when it worked properly. When it didn’t, I’d have to spend some time fixing it by manually scrolling through a long list of exercises with my pointer finger. All in all, it caused my workouts to slow down quite a bit and for me to take extra rest between sets – something I wasn’t complaining about, but it didn’t provide a good workflow.
Wear OS has much bigger problems though – its battery and performance. Every watch with Google’s OS on it that I’ve tried has been horrible. A day’s worth of battery was a dream that never came true for me, and I’ve gone through my fair share of watch replacements. Besides, Google Assistant and other apps work much better on Google’s new baby – the Fitbit.
I believe that in their effort to simplify Google Fit and Wear OS as a whole before they dive headfirst in with Fitbit and make that their golden child, they’ve “mistakenly” axed a popular feature. Maybe they’re tearing things down to a healthy, simple base before they build back up and add features back in. Either way, it would have been nice to get some kind of blog post detailing their reason for this change. As I stated earlier today, Google needs to focus on improving their communication with their users – they don’t need to explain all of their decisions, but it would greatly improve people’s trust in them.
