An APK teardown reveals the loss of Fitbit Pay and a familiar-looking squircle
Fitbit ranks among the top fitness wearable brands in the world. However, the company is yet to launch a device with Wear OS and Google has already been its parent company for more than a year now. While there have been conflicting reports about a Wear OS-branded Fitbit arriving soon, there’s been no talk about dates. We’re now getting a few more tidbits about this elusive entity, thanks to an APK teardown of Google Play services version 22.32.12.
APK teardowns are usually a good indicator of future changes and can often help uncover hidden features. The folks at our sister site XDA-Developers examined the code within the Play services update and found this particular string, presumably belonging to a user-facing prompt:
Tap to pay everywhere Google Pay is accepted, ride transit, and more, all with just your watch.
The text is attached to a generic “Fitbit watch illustration” as indicated by the code bearing the divisive squircle design — a square with rounded corners — similar to its current crop of Versa and Sense smartwatches. It’s too early to tell if the design shown in the illustrations below reflects what Fitbit’s Wear OS smartwatch will actually look like, but considering Fitbit’s recent and distinct preference towards squircle screens, it wouldn’t be a leap to assume that the company’s first Wear OS smartwatch will look familiar to longtime Fitbit watch users.
The illustrations highlight the wearable’s NFC capabilities, specifically for wireless payments using Google Pay. That opens up some expectation for Fitbit Pay to die off, though its current users might be hoping for a long goodbye. There isn’t a whole lot else we know about the smartwatch, though we hope to learn more about it during this year’s Pixel Fall Launch.
Yesterday, another teardown of Play Services v22.32.12 revealed mentions of Wear OS backups, a feature that’s missing from the current iteration of Google’s smartwatch operating system. Moreover, we learned that this backup feature would be tied with Google One, suggesting that it would work similarly to backing up your Android smartphone.
