[4][5] Fitbit LLC was founded as Healthy Metrics Research, Inc. in San Francisco, California, on March 26, 2007, by James Park (CEO) and Eric Friedman (CTO).

[35] In January 2024, it was reported that co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman were leaving the company following a reorganization of Google's hardware teams.

[39] Users have the ability to log their food, activities, and weight, to track over time and set daily and weekly goals for themselves for steps, calories burned and consumed, and distance walked.

[40] The social element anticipates an increase in motivation, and finds that users take an average of 700 more steps per day when they have friends on the app.

The new extended on-device dashboard (Fitbit Today) would include more data regarding sleep, water intake and weight.

[47] In December 2018, Fitbit added an API and open source tools to allow developers to better build apps for its smartwatch products.

[51][52] Despite getting emergency approval from the Food and Drug Administration,[53] the company does not consider Fitbit Flow as a drop-in replacement for traditional ventilators.

[55] Certain Sense, Versa, Ionic, and Charge products support Fitbit Pay, which is a digital wallet that uses NFC to make payments at point of sale.

Fitbit Pay will remain active Taiwan, Japan, and Saudi Arabia past the set discontinuation date for an unspecified length of time.

[64] A small 2015 study had participants wear multiple devices on their wrists and hips while performing different walking/running speeds on a treadmill.

[66] A 2019 review found that Fitbit devices, which utilize the sleep-staging feature, show a better performance than non-sleep-staging models, especially in differentiating wake from sleep.

[68] In April 2017, a woman claimed her Flex 2 device malfunctioned and caught fire, causing second-degree burns on her arm.

[75][76] On January 23, 2025, Fitbit was fined a $12.25 million civil penalty for failing to immediately report the burn issue to the CPSC.

[77] Starting in June 2011, Fitbit was criticized for its website's default activity-sharing settings, which made users' manually-entered physical activities available for public viewing.

[78] One specific issue, which technology blogs made fun of, was that some users were including details about their sex lives in their daily exercise logs, and this information was, by default, publicly available.

[78] Fitbit responded to criticism by making all such data private by default and requesting that search engines remove indexed user profile pages from their databases.

[91] Initially, Richard lied to police and law enforcement officials, claiming that an intruder had broken into their home and fatally shot his wife.

[91] However, Connie's Fitbit tracker showed that she was at the gym at the time Richard told police his wife was shot.

Data from her Fitbit fitness tracker showed that her heart rate spiked when Aiello visited her and stopped five minutes before he left.