“Having lost the title of top wearables maker to Apple last year, Fitbit’s decline is now accelerating and will only get worse from here,” Rich Duprey writes for The Motley Fool. “According to IDC’s latest market share figures, Apple’s share grew to 17% in the second quarter from 13% last year, while Fitbit’s fell from 12.8% to 9.5%.”
“This was the quarter in which Fitbit launched its Versa smartwatch as the wearables maker seeks to pivot from simple trackers to more advanced devices,” Duprey writes, “and the drop in market share could get worse as Apple just announced its latest Apple Watch, which seeks to capture the same consumers looking for ways to better monitor their health.”
“Apple is, of course, the smartwatch market leader and in the second quarter shipped 4.7 million units, IDC’s data show, a 38% increase from the year-ago period and 75% more than the total number of units shipped by Fitbit in the period,” Duprey writes. “And with the Apple Watch 4 dropping in a few days, the gap is going to widen further.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple Watch, killer.
Imagine if Apple Watch Nike+’s namesake app, Nike Run Club, actually worked instead of being an unreliable mess?
SEE ALSO:
Fitbit shares plunge on earning loss – February 26, 2018
John Gruber reviews Apple Watch Series 4: Takes the original design to a whole new level – September 20, 2018
Apple Watch Series 4 gets stellar reviews – September 19, 2018
CNBC reviews Apple Watch Series 4: ‘The best smartwatch you can buy’ – September 19, 2018
Hodinkee reviews Apple Watch Series 4: ‘It’s high time you give the Apple Watch a shot’ – September 19, 2018
The Verge reviews Apple Watch Series 4: The best gets better; at least an order of magnitude better than other smartwatches – September 19, 2018
CNBC reviews Apple Watch Series 4: ‘The best smartwatch you can buy’ – September 19, 2018
Apple Watch sets new all-time record for wearables shipments; ‘Apple has won the wearables game’ – analyst – February 7, 2018
Apple Watch sales momentum is growing; unit sales now rival those of Macintosh – January 23, 2018
Apple Watch Series 3 shipments predicted to rise to 23-25 million in 2018 – December 14, 2017
Apple Watch: The war for wearables is over, and Apple won – December 12, 2017
At least Fitbit wasn’t dumb enough to make the Versa round. The industry should be smart enough to know that if Jony Ive doesn’t think smartwatches should be round, it’s for a very good reason.
This is supposed to be good news? Satisfying news? No to both.
I don’t begrudge Fitbit at all – and I don’t get any satisfaction in its decline – like I do Samsung, Qualcomm, and MS and a plethora of brazen copyists and thieves of Apple products. Of the latter three offenders, I reserve my schadenfreude for Qualcomm’s predicament.
An excellent choice.
Unlike the copyists you mentioned who ripped off the iPhone, Fitbit was actually first to the market. What Apple did was create such seamless integration with the iPhone and allow for independent app development so that your Apple Watch became much more than just a fitness tracker, but a whole ecosystem. That’s why Fitbit started building in a whole bunch more functionality into its watches.
*still has a Fitbit instead of an Apple Watch*
I use their app to log food and a 3rd party app that kind of syncs my Apple Watch, but it has issues. Fitbit should start a subscription service for the Apple Watch instead of just blocking it. Either that or Apple should buy Fitbit to get access to its app as the Health app doesn’t do meals.
Fitbit is a tiny company doing the best it can with a very limited budget. I wish them all the best. Competís always good for the consumer.
The Apple Watch Series 4 is superior to the various Fitbit offerings in most respects but they do not track sleep. I have a Fitbit and that is one of the features I like best. It would seem that they could add this feature in software without adding sensors. They should do it.