One of our biggest complaints about Fitbit products for years is the fact that you’ll need to pay the $10 monthly fee to view your historical data. For example, you can only see up to seven days of your respiratory rate, resting heart rate, and heart rate variance, and only 90 days of everything else if you don’t pay. It was one of the biggest drawbacks of devices like the Pixel Watch, especially when you consider that competing products from Apple and Samsung don’t lock their own data behind a paywall. Today, Google announced that it is making “more of the insightful data from Fitbit’s health metrics dashboard available to all its users without a subscription.”
This includes respiratory rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, oxygen saturation, and resting heart rate. “Now, even without a Premium subscription, users will now be able to see 30-day and 90-day views of their data to track trends over time,” the company said in a statement. To be clear, the most basic metrics like step count, miles traveled, calories burned, and heart rate have always been free, while the information mentioned above was presented on the Health Metrics dashboard as daily, weekly, monthly or 90 days.
While there’s still a 90-day limit on viewing activity history for those metrics, this at least brings Fitbit’s products closer to the competition. The company has industry-leading sleep tracking and health features, including the ability to see how much time you spend in zones like REM, deep and light sleep throughout the night. As of now, information like those sleep stages aren’t locked behind Premium, though sleep profile, guided sleep programs, snore detection, and additional information about what’s affecting your sleep score are.
It’s a good thing Fitbit isn’t paying for its Sleep Stages anymore, as Apple recently added the same feature to watchOS, while Samsung has offered it for years. And both competitors give this, along with other sleep metrics and guidance, to their users at no extra charge.
Update (at 4 pm ET)– This article has been updated to confirm that Sleep Stages is not a Premium feature, while detailing which sleep-related features are.
