Google scaling down Fitbit & Nest products to Pixel availability

Here’s the crux of the article in video form:

One of my major problems with the Google Pixel brand is its more limited global availability. Today, Pixel devices are available only in a handful of markets in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Google doesn’t sell its Pixel products in Africa. But given the growing presence of the Pixel brand in Europe coupled with the overall market performance across the US and the marketing efforts in India and Taiwan over the recent past, you’d be forgiven to expect Google to double down on expanding the brand to more regions. But instead, the search giant is doing the exact opposite by scaling down its presence in nearly 30 countries across the globe.

In a shocking development, Google has announced that it will be scaling down its Fitbit and Nest business to regions where the Pixel is available. Given the more limited availability of the brand across the globe, it’s a tad disappointing to see this happening under Google’s watch.

While this is in line with Google’s efforts to kill the Fitbit brand in favor of Pixel wearables, it doesn’t sit right with me. As someone living in Africa and a sucker for Google products, South Africa was my only hope of ever seeing Google Pixel products selling officially across the land of milk and honey. However, Google confirmed to TechCentral that not only will Fitbit be discontinued, but Nest products will also be unavailable in the country going forward.

Google now owns Fitbit. Given Fitbit is available in more countries than the Pixel, my hope was that Google would leverage this physical presence to expand availability of its Pixel line to more markets. This way, the company wouldn’t be deploying new physical stores and teams, but simply transitioning its line of products from Fitbit to Pixel. However, Google says it will instead be pulling Fitbit and Nest services from nearly 30 countries to “align our hardware portfolio to map closer to Pixel’s regional availability.”

The search giant has also updated the official Fitbit support pages in Europe and APAC to confirm the changes. In Europe, affected countries include Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Slovakia. This is a big blow for a region where the Pixel’s popularity was just beginning to get up to speed.

In the APAC region, Fitbit products will no longer be sold in Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Mexico and all Latin American countries are also affected by this change, as mentioned on the official support page.

In a statement to Android Authority, Google says:

We communicated that we will stop selling Fitbit products in select countries in order to align our hardware portfolio to map closer to Pixel’s regional availability. We remain committed to our customers and have not made any changes that impact the existing Fitbit devices they already own. Existing Fitbit customers will continue to have access to the same customer support, warranties will still be honored, and products will continue to receive software and security updates.

The fact that Fitbit has been present in so many countries made it a global brand. But the recent Google-Fitbit integration has been a major cause of pain among users. Still, the least I expected was for Google to take advantage of Fitbit’s existing global customer base to expand Pixel availability to those countries they were missing. They went about it the wrong way, though. But if Google is actually scaling down Fitbit to markets where the Pixel is available, it is a missed opportunity to get the Pixel brand to more people across the globe.