Google has folded the Fitbit brand into a wider Google Health service and launched a screenless wrist-worn band called Fitbit Air, the company's first new wearable product in fourteen months. The launch, announced at a closed press event at the Mountain View headquarters on Thursday afternoon and embargoed to Friday morning, is the most significant restructuring of the Fitbit business since Google completed the acquisition in 2021.
The Fitbit Premium subscription that has shipped with all Fitbit devices since 2018 has been retired and replaced by Google Health, a $9.99-a-month service that bundles the existing Fitbit features — sleep scoring, daily readiness, exercise auto-detection — with a Gemini-powered AI coach that the company is positioning as a direct competitor to Whoop's coaching layer and to Eight Sleep's Pod 4 software.
The Fitbit Air, which will go on sale in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Germany on May 27, retails at $129, a third of the price of the Whoop 5.0 and well below the $169 starting price of the Apple Watch SE. The band has no display: notifications, coaching prompts and on-device controls all run through a paired phone or through a small bone-conduction haptic in the strap clasp. Battery life is rated at fourteen days.
Google said the Health service had been built on top of the same medical-information knowledge graph that powers the Search "health-snippets" feature, and that the AI coach had been tuned against a corpus of more than 200,000 anonymised consultations from the company's Fitbit Care telehealth pilot. The pilot, which has been running quietly in California, Texas and Washington since late 2024, will be wound down at the end of June.
Whoop, which has built a $5 billion private valuation on the strength of its band-only proposition, said in a brief statement on Friday afternoon that "category competition validates the model" but declined to comment on whether it would adjust its own subscription pricing in response. Apple, whose Apple Watch business has been losing share at the lower end of the wearable market for two consecutive quarters, did not respond to requests for comment.