adidas wearable

Adidas closes its wearable fitness devices division

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Adidas cut its fitness watches development division

Adidas is getting out officially in 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 has its hardware division closed.

Adidas will be changing efforts instead to focus on software. Especially, the Adidas App and Runtastic (which the company acquired back in 2015). Adidas had launched multiple wearable fitness trackers under the name miCoach. Culminating in the miCoach smart Run smartwatch But it seems that none of them actually quite took off.

Adidas has already been moving away from hardware development for some time — in the last year’s report from Wearable. The Adidas wearable sports electronics vice president Stacey Burr commented that “we are not going to see a new running watch from Adidas for a while.”

It is a path that more or fewer mirrors the move made by Nike a few years back. That also attempted 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 does not completely disappear from the hardware front. Already the company has announced plans to team up with Fitbit for an Adidas edition of the Ionic smartwatch sometime in 2018.

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