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 , but it seems that none of them really quite took off.
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.
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/12/18/16792684/adidas-wearable-fitness-devices-gps-watch-business-shut-down


