Fitbit is now Google Health: what changed, and the lesson for everyone else
In May 2026 the Fitbit app became the Google Health app. Core data carried across, several long-standing features did not, and a deletion deadline followed a couple of months later. Whether or not you have ever owned a Fitbit, it is worth understanding what happened, because the pattern applies to every health app whose history lives on someone else’s servers.
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What actually changed
The rename landed on 19 May 2026 and rolled out across Android and iOS over the following week. It was not optional. The everyday metrics — steps, heart rate, workouts, sleep — carried over into the new app. Several features did not: badges and the historical badge collection, the community feed and open groups, direct messaging, custom profiles, and Sleep Profile were all retired. Google also began processing deletion of some legacy data in mid-July, which gave users roughly two months to export anything they wanted to keep.
Why a rebrand can cost you history
None of this is unusual, and that is the point. When your record lives in a cloud account, the feature set is a product decision rather than a possession. A team can retire a view, change how a score is computed, or decide that a nine-year badge collection is not worth migrating — and the only recourse is an export window you have to notice in time. The data you actively look at is usually safe in these transitions. The data you assumed would always be there is what disappears.
Getting your own data out
Google Takeout remains the route for a full export, and — helpfully — the underlying data category was not renamed with the app, so folder structure and file formats stayed as they were. Take the export even if you are staying: a local archive costs nothing and is the only version of your history that no product decision can touch. If you are moving to another platform, do the export before you stop wearing the old device, not after, because access is tied to the account and the account is tied to the product.
This is not a Google-specific problem
Oura is retiring its own web dashboard in 2026, and with it a set of correlation and export tools people had used for years. Whoop, Garmin and Apple have all reorganised or replaced app surfaces at various points. Every one of these is a reasonable product decision, and every one of them means that a feature you rely on is not a feature you own. The wearable on your finger keeps measuring; what changes is the software that lets you look.
The practical rule
Keep your own copy, and prefer tools that read from an export or an API rather than requiring you to live inside one company’s app. That does not mean distrusting the manufacturer — it means recognising that a health record is worth more the longer it runs, and that the value compounds precisely over the timescale on which apps get rebuilt. Five years of nights is a genuinely useful record. It is also long enough that whatever app you use today will have been redesigned at least once.
Vitra is the local-first version of that idea for Oura: it syncs your data down to your own Mac or PC, keeps it in a database on your machine, computes every trend and correlation locally, and keeps working on the history you already have. Your health data never leaves your machine, and it does not need to be in anyone’s current app design to still be readable next year.
Frequently asked questions
Pedro Thomaz builds Vitra, a desktop app that reads Oura data against your own baseline instead of a population average. He has worn a ring daily for years and reads these same numbers every morning — which is where most of what is written here comes from. Vitra is not a medical device and nothing on this blog is medical advice.
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