Withings would like Fitbit users to move to its platform now, please

Withings
Activité wants your Fitbit data

Recently defected from Fitbit to Withings? If you've built up years of accomplishments and data on your steps and other key fitness markers, you'll be chuffed to know you can now import them into Withings' own ecosystem.

The somewhat self-explanatorily-named Switch-to-Withings service lets you retrieve your Fitbit history and import it into the Withings Health Mate app, where you can then continue to count your never-ending sequence of thousands of wearying steps, forever, under the watchful gaze of Withings, on its Activité and Activité Pop analogue-watches-with-step-counting-in and also its more traditional Pulse Ox tracker.

Withings is at pains to point out that it's, "Committed to keeping data under the ownership of users and knows the importance for customers to have full control over their activity."

It adds, "Switch-to-Withings… ensures that customers aren't obligated to stay with one company, by making previous data accessible and allowing new users to take full advantage of the key features of the Withings Health Mate App."

In other words, it's saying, "Stop using Fitbit and come be in our gang instead." Fighting words, backed up by this powerful, if garbled, infographic.

Here's how the magic works

This may seem like very dull news, but it's actually an interesting move. It's highly doubtful Fitbit has collaborated in any way on making its data available to a rival - the market-leading American brand refuses to allow its data so much as to appear in Apple Health at present. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that it could attempt to block Withings' cheeky data exporting at a later date.