What you need to know
- Google has moved Fitbit's Help Center to its official support pages, under the domain support.google.com/fitbit.
- The overall content in the Help Center is still the same, but the design has received a facelift that makes it fit in with other Google support documents.
- The move comes just days after Google announced a large restructuring effort that included layoffs and Fitbit heads leaving the company.
Google has integrated Fitbit's Help Center into the company's existing network of support documents, in a shift that comes just days after it announced a restructuring of its hardware teams. The new Help Center is found under the support.google.com/fitbit domain, as first spotted by 9to5Google.
The old Fitbit Help Center, formerly discoverable at help.fitbit.com, is still up-and-running at its original domain. However, attempting to search for something in the Help Center will redirect the query to the new support pages hosted by Google. After redirecting, the new Help Center explains the change in a banner.
"We're excited to announce that the Fitbit Help Center has received a makeover," the banner reads. "We've refreshed the design with a cleaner and more user-friendly interface."
While most specific support documents now direct users to Google domains, there are still some prominent Help Center pages that you can still access through the Fitbit site. These include big categories like Getting started and Accounts. However, beyond the product pages, each individual link on the Fitbit pages will redirect to Google support documents when clicked.
It stands to reason that the Fitbit pages will eventually disappear for good. But for now, the Fitbit Help Center page still exists as a means to redirect users to Google's own support documents.
The transition of Fitbit's Help Center to Google's existing support documents is unsurprising, given the company's restructuring efforts made public last week. Google laid off hundreds of workers across different teams on Wednesday, with the known total reaching around 1,000 layoffs company-wide. The moves were part of a greater effort to merge once-separate hardware teams, like Fitbit, Pixel, and Nest, into one unit.
In corresponding moves, Google announced the departure of James Park and Eric Friedman, who are co-founders of Fitbit. The company also mentioned other Fitbit leaders would be leaving the company, but did not specifically name them. At the time, all signs pointed to the Fitbit brand coming to an end under Google.
With the consolidation of Fitbit's Help Center under Google's support domains less than a week later, that only looks to be more likely.
It's worth noting that there are a few aspects of Fitbit that still stand alone. The brand's community pages are still under the Fitbit domain, and online chat support is still covered by Fitbit, too.
Who knows how long those services will remain independent, though. For context, Google's community pages for its Nest brand are still separate to this day. Only time will tell what the fate of Fitbit under Google will hold.
