My Fitbit Charge 6 Died [RANT]

So three years is all a Fitbit is gonna last? This pisses me the hell off since the Fitbit has been my go-to sleep tracker for a few years now despite the quality of life going down the shitter faster than EDP’s chances to stay out of jail; I am now left looking at new options to handle step tracking.

My journey with Fitbit began in 2016 with the Charge 2, which launched off the back of the Pebble acquisition for $23 million, but by 2021 the watches slowly began having more and more issues. My first big issue began in May 2026 when Google merged the Fitbit and Google Health apps.

The first issue that happened during the transfer involved some fintech companies and banks; I saw multiple threads about this at the time and I personally had issues where my Fitbit was seen as a Fitbit but was within the Google Pay system. Thankfully that was fixed later on, but that should have been fixed right away, not something I was forced to wait on when I had been using it fine for years.

It would make sense they would verify things would work with major card issuers.

In “Health & Fitness App Report” from Business of Apps, during the 2020s Fitbit had 41 to 33 million monthly active users along with 9% of the total fitness app market, so these aren’t some small fry, but if they want to dethrone Apple’s 17% they’re gonna need to do far better rather than the enshittification we’ve been seeing more and more from Google, Google is squandering the good will people had for Fitbit.

Today, while trying to use my Fitbit Charge 6, it would not boot; it would reboot constantly and I am left wondering whose idea was this? At what point does a company look at their product and keep lowering the quality more and more until it’s a damn joke? Well, seems the Fitbit Charge 6 is that point.

I loved the SpO2 blood oxygen tracking and EDA stress scan features since I am someone who likes data, as can be seen from the fact I log everything from the music I listen to, my game achievements, books I reference on my blogs, the whole nine yards.

Now some readers might wonder if it’s old? No, I got the Fitbit Charge 6 right before a massive trip I was doing right before the July 19, 2024 CrowdStrike global IT outage. I remember since I was stressed beyond belief during that outage.

Yet here we are, August of 2026, and it’s now dead? Who designed this device to die so quickly? My previous Fitbit lasted a good 4 years before it died; now this one can barely last 3?

I think whoever worked on this version knew that Google was going to be taking the product line and ruining it with their own bloated software so didn’t care, since I can’t think of any reason they’d slowly over time make the device more clunky, buggy, and prone to crashing while at the same time I’ve seen them competing to get more market share.

Now it left me wondering who or what will be my next sleep tracker or at the very least step counter. I have a Galaxy Watch 6 which, during this rant’s writing, actually got updated to the latest OS, One UI Watch 9.0, and is for now my watch for more important events, but it doesn’t have the battery for daily use for me since I need my smartwatch to give me alerts for calendar events or messages.

With the upcoming Pebble Watch return and Ollee Watch on my radar, I might look at getting an Ollee.