Some interesting news hit our inbox last night. It looks like Nike is laying off the engineers and the rest of the hardware division responsible for the Nike Fuelband and other Nike+ products. So I guess we definitely won’t be seeing that Android support now. CNET is reporting that the Fuelband team has been let go, and Nike is halting development of the Fuelband altogether. Nike was supposedly working on a “slim” version of the Fuelband as well, which is being discontinued before launch, as well as anything else that the 70-person division was working on. Word of this hit an anonymous social network last week, known as Secret.ly. Here’s what an anonymous poster posted over on Secret.ly:
“The douchebag execs at Nike are going to lay off a bunch of the eng team who developed The FuelBand, and other Nike+ stuff. Mostly because the execs committed gross negligence, wasted tons of money, and didn’t know what they were doing”
This comes just shortly after Nike opened the Fuel Lab in San Francisco. This was a think tank for the company to test connected devices, like that of the Fuelband. Nike had planned to release their API, which might still happen. So it’s possible that Nike has partners and plans in place for the Fuel Lab. But it’s still a bit strange to see this happen like this.
Remember that this is just a rumor, but with it coming out of CNET it’s likely to be true. As they aren’t like Digitimes and have a questionable track record. We’ll probably hear more about this next week once Nike releases an official statement, if they actually do. We’ve been waiting on Android support for the Fuelband, and it’s definitely not coming our way now, which is unfortunate. But there are plenty of other alternatives out there like Jawbone UP, Fitbit Flex, and even the Samsung Gear Fit.