On 19 May 2026, Google replaced the Fitbit app with something called Google Health. Three weeks later, the picture among long-term Fitbit users is clear: features got removed, the social heart of the app got gutted, and the headline replacement (an AI Coach) costs USD $9.99 per month for what used to come free. This is the complete audit of what changed, what now costs money, and what your options are if you have had enough.
If you are trying to make sense of what is happening, start with two dates.
This was the day Google completed the transition. The Fitbit app on your phone was renamed Google Health overnight, with a new icon, a restyled UI, and a different sign-in flow. It was also the day Fitbit-account-only logins stopped working: a Google account is now mandatory for everyone, and users who never linked their account before this date have been locked out.
If you never migrated your old Fitbit account to a Google account before 19 May, Google has given you 57 days from the rebrand to export your data via Google Takeout. After 15 July, unmigrated data is permanently deleted. There is no public recovery path and no extension has been announced. If you are in this group, this article is academic until you have a Takeout export on disk. See the deadline page for the urgent steps.
If your app says Google Health and you log in normally, neither date affects your data. What you are dealing with is the rebrand itself, which is what the rest of this audit is about.
This is the part that has actually upset people. Google did not just change the name on the app icon. They took features out.
Every badge in the old Fitbit app, the ones that rewarded daily step counts, weekly distance milestones, lifetime elevation climbs, and so on, has been removed. The official replacement is that the new AI Coach will "celebrate progress" with personalised messages. For users who had multi-year badge collections, those collections are gone. There is no public way to recover them.
The monthly Sleep Profile, which characterised your sleep pattern as a Bear, Dolphin, Tortoise, Giraffe, Parrot, or Hedgehog, has been retired. The free tier does not get a replacement. The AI Coach subscription includes a narrative summary of your sleep instead.
Your daily Stress Management Score (a 1 to 100 number) has been replaced by a metric called Resilience, with three vague labels: Optimal, Balanced, or Low. The underlying calculation has not been disclosed and there is no way to see the number behind the label.
Direct messages between users? Gone. Group challenges with friends? Gone. The friends leaderboard that ranked your step count against your contacts? Gone. The community feed where you could see what other users were posting? Gone. Google has positioned this as a privacy and focus improvement. For users who joined Fitbit because of the social accountability, it is the end of the platform they signed up for.
The standalone Fitbit Community forum at community.fitbit.com has been retired. Long-running threads on troubleshooting, device support, group challenges, and feature requests are no longer accessible in their original location. Google directs former forum users to the broader Google Help community, which does not retain the Fitbit-specific structure or the long-running discussions.
Daily step goals have been replaced by weekly targets. If you used to hit 10,000 steps a day, you now hit 70,000 over the week. Google says weekly targets are more "psychologically sustainable." For users who used the daily streak as motivation, the streak counter behaviour is the casualty of this change.
Most of these are not deletions, just reorganisations. The cumulative effect, though, is that an app long-term users had memorised has changed enough to require relearning. Food logging in particular has moved from a top-level tab to a secondary screen.
The single most controversial change is the new subscription. Google's AI Coach replaces several features that were previously either fully free or bundled into the old Fitbit Premium tier, and sits at USD $9.99 per month, or $119.88 a year.
The structural shift is the relevant detail. The old Fitbit Premium ($9.99 a month) added bonus content on top of a working free tier. The new AI Coach takes back features the free tier used to have. Same price, less value in the free tier, more pressure to subscribe.
To put $119.88 a year in context, here is what you can compare it to:
Garmin Connect, the most direct functional comparison, is free for the life of your Garmin device and includes Body Battery (Garmin's stress and energy metric), Training Readiness, a full Sleep Score with stages, daily challenges, achievement badges, and a working friends/groups system. The hardware is a one-time cost, the software costs nothing per month.
If your app still says Fitbit and you never migrated to a Google account, this is the section that matters most. Google has been clear: data for unmigrated Fitbit accounts begins permanent deletion on 15 July 2026, with no recovery process and no extension. As of writing, that is roughly 36 days away.
If you are in this group, here is what to do today:
takeout.google.com and sign in. If you cannot sign in because your old Fitbit credentials no longer work, you may need to recover the Google account that was associated with your Fitbit account, or contact Google support. Time is short.You have three realistic options. The right one depends on how much you used the removed features and how much $119.88 a year matters to you.
If the AI Coach, enhanced sleep analysis, and personalised insights are worth $119.88 a year to you, the path of least resistance is to subscribe and stay where you are. Your data stays in one place, your device works as it did, and you accept the new economics of the platform.
This is the right call if: you actively used Daily Readiness, you liked the old personalised insights, and the loss of social features and badges doesn't bother you enough to switch platforms.
If you only ever used Fitbit for the basics (step count, distance, weight tracking), the free tier of Google Health is still functional for those. You will not get badges, the Sleep Profile, social features, or AI-driven insights. Step counting still works.
This is the right call if: you were a casual user and didn't engage with the social or advanced-analytics features. The downgrade is mostly cosmetic for you.
The reason Wearable Converter exists is that this third option is harder than it sounds. Fitness platforms make their data formats deliberately incompatible. You cannot just press "Export to Garmin" inside the Google Health app. The path is: Google Takeout to export, conversion to the target platform's format, then import. We handle the conversion step for Garmin Connect. The cost is $9 USD, one time, with five conversions included per licence.
This is the right call if: the removed features mattered to you, the $119.88/year cost is unattractive, or you have been wanting to try Garmin's ecosystem anyway. The math is straightforward: $9 once is less than one month of the subscription you are considering not paying.
community.fitbit.com. Daily step goals (replaced by weekly targets). The dashboard, food logging, and workout labelling were also rearranged.
community.fitbit.com. Google directs former users to the broader Google Help community, which does not have the same Fitbit-specific structure.