Enlarge (credit: Fitbit)

Google's continued abuse of the Fitbit brand is continuing with the shutdown of the web dashboard. Fitbit.com used to be both a storefront and a way for users to get a big-screen UI to sift through reams of fitness data. The store closed up shop in April, and now the web dashboard is dying in July.

In a post on the "Fitbit Community" forums, the company said: "Next month, we’re consolidating the Fitbit.com dashboard into the Fitbit app. The web browser will no longer offer access to the Fitbit.com dashboard after July 8, 2024." That's it. There's no replacement or new fitness thing Google is more interested in; web functionality is just being removed. Google, we'll remind you, used to be a web company. Now it's a phone app or nothing. Google did the same thing to its Google Fit product in 2019, killing off the more powerful website in favor of an app focus.

Dumping the web app leaves a few holes in Fitbit's ecosystem. The Fitbit app doesn't support big screens like tablet devices, so this is removing the only large-format interface for data. Fitbit's competitors all have big-screen interfaces. Garmin has a very similar website, and the Apple Watch has an iPad health app. This isn't an improvement. To make matters worse, the app does not have the features of the web dashboard, with many of the livid comments in the forums on Reddit calling out the app's deficiencies in graphing, achievement statistics, calorie counting, and logs.

Enlarge / The Pixel 8. (credit: Google)

Google's June Android update is out, and it's bringing a few notable changes for Pixel phones. The most interesting is that the Pixel 8a, Pixel 8, and Pixel 8 Pro are all getting DisplayPort Alt Mode capabilities via their USB-C ports. This means you can go from USB-C to DisplayPort and plug right into a TV or monitor. This has been rumored forever and landed in some of the Android Betas earlier, but now it's finally shipping out to production.

The Pixel 8's initial display support is just a mirrored mode. You can either get an awkward vertical phone in the middle of your wide-screen display or turn the phone sideways and get a more reasonable layout. You could see it being useful for videos or presentations. It would be nice if it could do more.

Alongside this year-plus of display port rumors has been a steady drum beat (again) for an Android desktop mode. Google has been playing around with this idea since Android 7.0 in 2016. In 2019, we were told it was just a development testing project, and it never shipped to any real devices. Work around Android's desktop mode has been heating up, though, so maybe a second swing at this idea will result in an actual product.