If you used to run a Workweek Hustle with your coworkers or a Weekend Warrior with your family, you already know the bad news. In March 2023, Fitbit removed its built-in social features: Challenges, Adventures, Workweek Hustle, and Weekend Warrior are gone, and they have not come back in that form. Plenty of people who used Fitbit mainly to compete with friends were left with a step counter and no one to race.
The good news: you do not need to buy a new watch to get challenges back.
What Fitbit removed
Fitbit kept the tracker. Your steps, heart rate, sleep, and daily goals all still work in the Fitbit app. What disappeared was the social competition layer: the group step races, the themed solo journeys, and the community challenges that gave a lot of people their reason to close rings in the first place. Fitbit later began adding newer Premium features, but the classic friend challenges most people miss were never restored in the same form.
Did Fitbit challenges come back in the Google Health app?
Partly, and the part matters. The Google Health app that replaced the Fitbit app does have a social layer again: you can add friends and compare weekly step totals and cardio load, and Google's help pages describe friends being ranked by their weekly step or cardio load total. What those pages describe is a running leaderboard, not the return of the timed formats. Workweek Hustle, Weekend Warrior, and Adventures are not part of it. So if what you miss is an ongoing scoreboard among Fitbit friends, the Google Health app now covers that. If what you miss is a five day race that starts Monday and ends Friday, or a weekend sprint with a finish line, that is still gone.
Can I compete with friends who left Fitbit?
Only the ones who also use Google Health. The leaderboard ranks friends you have added inside that app, so the question is not what watch someone wears, it is whether they run Google Health at all. Google Health can pull data from an Apple Watch, a Garmin, a WHOOP or an Oura ring through Health Connect or Apple Health, so the hardware is not the blocker. The cost is that everyone in the group has to adopt Google Health, keep their own device app syncing into it, and add each other there, and what they get at the end is a step or cardio load ranking. That is a lot of setup to ask of a group that scattered across brands, which is why a board that reads each person's own provider directly is the easier ask.
One practical thing if you are moving over: if you used to sign in with a Fitbit account, your old friends list does not carry itself across. Google's help pages say you need to add your friends again inside the Google Health app.
So the job is narrow and specific. You are not replacing your Fitbit. You are replacing the one thing it stopped doing: letting you compete with your friends.
What to look for in a replacement
Most "best Fitbit challenge app" lists miss one thing. In the years since Fitbit dropped challenges, your friends scattered. Some stayed on Fitbit, some moved to an Apple Watch, one bought a Garmin, someone is on an Oura ring now. If you pick a replacement that only works with Fitbit, you have recreated the original problem: half your group cannot join.
That is the gap MoveTogether was built for. It reads your Fitbit activity directly and drops it onto a shared leaderboard alongside friends on Apple Watch, Garmin, WHOOP, Oura, Strava, and Polar. You keep your Fitbit. Your friends keep whatever they switched to. Everyone competes anyway.
Rebuilding your old Fitbit challenge formats
Most of the formats people miss map cleanly onto MoveTogether competitions, which support weekend, weekly, monthly, and fully custom date ranges, plus repeating cycles and team mode.
| Old Fitbit format | How to rebuild it | MoveTogether setting |
|---|---|---|
| Workweek Hustle | A Monday to Friday step race with coworkers | Custom competition, Mon to Fri date range |
| Weekend Warrior | A Saturday and Sunday sprint | Weekend competition |
| Ongoing group challenge | A rolling weekly or monthly leaderboard | Weekly or monthly competition with a repeating cycle |
| Team vs team | Split the group into sides | Team mode |
One format does not carry over: Adventures, Fitbit's solo themed step journeys. MoveTogether's closest equivalent is Past You Ghost, which races you against your own best week rather than a map. If Adventures was your favorite part of Fitbit, that is a real thing you will miss.
The upgrade Fitbit challenges never had
Even at their best, Fitbit challenges only worked between Fitbit users. That was fine in 2019 when everyone in your group had a Fitbit. It is the core limitation today, when they do not. Cross-device competition is the point now. If you want the longer version of why single-device challenges keep breaking, see how to compete with friends who have different wearables.
How to set it up with your Fitbit
Getting your Fitbit data into MoveTogether takes about two minutes:
- Download MoveTogether on iPhone and, during onboarding, choose the Google Fitbit option.
- Sign in with the Google account your Fitbit uses. Your steps, calories, exercise minutes, and workouts start syncing into competitions automatically.
- Start a competition, pick the format from the table above, and invite your friends by link. They join on whatever device they own.
The full connection details, including which Fitbit models are supported, are on the Fitbit integration page, and if you want the side-by-side, the Google Fitbit vs MoveTogether comparison lays out exactly where each one wins.
MoveTogether connects to Google Health/Fitbit at the provider level. Check Data Sources in the app for the providers and devices available to your account, and reconnect there if prompted. MoveTogether is available on iOS and in open beta on Android.
The honest limits
MoveTogether is not a Fitbit replacement in the hardware sense. It does not track your sleep, it does not measure stress or readiness, and it will not replace the Fitbit app for your daily numbers. Keep Fitbit for all of that. What MoveTogether replaces is the one piece Fitbit removed and never gave back: real challenges with your friends, now without the requirement that everyone own the same brand of watch.
MoveTogether is free to start, with up to two active competitions on the free tier, so you can rebuild your old Workweek Hustle this week and see whether the group shows up before anyone pays for anything.
