I don't know abut GoPro, but Fitbit deserves to fail. Their hardware is terrible. The warranty only lasts one year, yet I've had to replace both Fitbit devices I've had twice within that one year. I'm now Fitbit-less because the latest, a Charge HR, failed for the third time, and it's now out of that one year warranty.
To give you an idea of how bad the Charge HR is, its charging plug attaches with metal prongs, but it plugs into a slim plastic housing that is only glued to the rest of the device. The obvious result is that the plastic housing eventually gets pulled off with the plug. That's how two of my three Charge HRs have died. It'd be like if your laptop were ruined within four months because the power cable pulled off an essential piece of the laptop housing rather than detaching cleanly, and now it won't attach in order to charge. The third Charge HR bricked itself during an unprompted firmware update, which started randomly and then I guess got interrupted midway through when I moved my phone too far from the device. It never recovered.
I don't know what the hell they're optimizing for over at Fitbit HQ, but they're trying to sell $10 throw-away quality devices for >$100. It's outrageous. I actively discourage everyone I know from ever buying anything from them, and many other people I know have also completely sworn them off for the same reason. Their product just sucks.
I forgot to write my conclusion because I got so livid and carried away about how much Fitbits suck, so here it is:
I don't think Fitbit's troubles are necessarily an indictment of the hardware industry as a whole. I think they're particular to that company having a horrible product and horrible hardware engineering, to the point where poor build quality actively repulses users rather than creating repeat customers. GoPro similarly has lots of issues that I've heard from others, but I don't have first-hand experience like I do with Fitbit so I won't spend any further time on it.
Contrast with, say, Apple, which is still a hardware company more so than it is anything else, and has become the largest publicly traded company in the world by doing so. I'm not a huge Apple fan by any means, but at least the devices don't suffer from such horrible flaws. My next laptop might not be another Macbook Pro, but it's at least in the running as an option because I've liked the one I currently have. Fitbit does not have that same charity from me.
> they're trying to sell $10 throw-away quality devices for >$100
I can say their software is in the same category from personal experience. Their Android app was written through minimum cost outsourcing, has no comments (since the developers didn't speak English well), a half dozen layers of abstraction when two would work, and is riddled with countless poorly documented strange edge cases and hacks throughout that make maintainability and enhancement a disaster.
On the user side, this is why features are rarely added and the software tends to lock up and crash a lot, and can brick devices during firmware update. Fixing even trivial bugs or adding basic features like social or counterfeit detection right takes much more work than it should since you have to navigate all that and may break something else while trying to do what you are doing.
They hired a few internal people around the time of the IPO, but they universally don't do much. The tech lead of the team generally came in, complained about some random thing that wasn't even accurate to make it seem like he did something, then left at 4PM. He wasn't in the office enough to know anything about what his team was doing.
A typical internal developer played Clash of Clans all day. When showed logs of his code not working he called meeting after meeting with management to get the guy with logs of the failing use case fired. The culture there is that there's no reason to do work there if you can office politics with your friends to get out of it.
Even given a reasonable commit adjusting timeouts to match the time taken for Bluetooth operations to the slowest observed device and fix several long running file transfers timing out by resetting the timeout each block transferred, he blew up and removed all timeouts for file transfers (bringing back the potential lock up issue) and called a half dozen meetings to fight it.
The culture there is just noxious and actively fights anyone trying to do work.
Wow, thank you for the insider perspective. That's truly horrifying that a $2B company (previously $10B) that depends heavily on software outsourced so much of its core competency like that. Talk about being penny wise and pound foolish. I've worked at two ~$10M companies that used all in-sourced development (i.e. me and my coworkers) and, while not without their faults, were significantly higher functioning.
Also, how the fuck do you brick a device by updating it? Wasn't this problem solved decades ago? You upload the new image and then, only once it's completely transferred and verified, do you atomically switch over to it. Are you telling me that they really made it so that the firmware update overwrites the existing firmware, so that any interruption in the process causes it to go poof? Ugh. I know that requires double the internal memory, but c'mon, this is 2016. The cost of that is some very tiny insignificant fraction of what an RMA costs. Never before in my life have I ever irrevocably bricked a device by updating its firmware.
To give you an idea of how bad the Charge HR is, its charging plug attaches with metal prongs, but it plugs into a slim plastic housing that is only glued to the rest of the device. The obvious result is that the plastic housing eventually gets pulled off with the plug. That's how two of my three Charge HRs have died. It'd be like if your laptop were ruined within four months because the power cable pulled off an essential piece of the laptop housing rather than detaching cleanly, and now it won't attach in order to charge. The third Charge HR bricked itself during an unprompted firmware update, which started randomly and then I guess got interrupted midway through when I moved my phone too far from the device. It never recovered.
I don't know what the hell they're optimizing for over at Fitbit HQ, but they're trying to sell $10 throw-away quality devices for >$100. It's outrageous. I actively discourage everyone I know from ever buying anything from them, and many other people I know have also completely sworn them off for the same reason. Their product just sucks.