Adidas will quit making wearable fitness devices

Adidas is officially getting out of the wearable fitness industry, at least when it comes to making its own devices, according to a report from the Portland Business Journal that the company is shuttering its hardware division.



Adidas will be shifting efforts instead to focus on software — specifically, the Adidas App and Runtastic (which the company bought back in 2015). Adidas had released multiple wearable fitness trackers under the name miCoach, culminating in the miCoach Smart Run smartwatch, but it seems that none of them really quite took off.


ADIDAS HAD ALREADY BEEN MOVING AWAY FROM HARDWARE DEVELOPMENT FOR SOME TIME
 
Adidas had already been moving away from hardware development for some time — in a report last year from Wareable, Stacey Burr, the vice president of wearable sports electronics at Adidas commented that "we're not going to see a new running watch from Adidas for a while.”

It’s a path that more or less mirrors the move made by Nike a few years back, which also tried and failed with its Fuelband fitness tracking hardware before pivoting to work on software with partners like Apple (which now makes a Nike-branded Apple Watch).

And like Nike, Adidas isn’t completely vanishing from the hardware front either — the company has already announced plans to team up with Fitbit for an Adidas edition of the Ionic smartwatch sometime in 2018.