(Credit: Google)
Fitbit's first new fitness tracker since 2023’s Charge 6 isn't an upgrade—it's a rethink. The $99 Fitbit Air ditches the display, relying instead on subtle haptics and passive tracking to deliver a quieter, less intrusive experience.
The move puts Fitbit closer to Whoop's philosophy of always-on, screenless wearables built for holistic health tracking, like the Whoop 5.0. Similar to its rival, the Air is designed to fade into the background, pairing a week of battery life with Fitbit's suite of health sensors. At this price, it's one of the most accessible entries yet in the screenless tracker category.
Alongside the Air launch, the Fitbit app is being rebranded as Google Health, with a redesigned interface that still keeps core activity, sleep, and health metrics free across Android and iOS. Tied to that update is the wider rollout of Google’s Gemini-powered Health Coach. Available through a $9.99 monthly or $99.99 annual Premium subscription, the AI assistant offers personalized workout plans, adaptive wellness advice, and more advanced sleep insights—marking a deeper move into software-driven fitness guidance.
Let's delve into all the details of the Air and the end of the Fitbit app.
Fitbit Air: The Screenless Gamble That Could Pay Off
Let's start with the basics. The Fitbit Air is set to hit stores on May 26 and includes three months of Google Health Premium. It will be available in Berry (red), Fog (silver), Lavender (purple), or Obsidian (black). Each band color is available in different materials.
The default Performance Loop band is a lightweight fabric designed for comfort. Other band styles like Active and Elevated Modern use a rugged plastic. Google will also sell a special edition Stephen Curry Performance Loop, featuring a brown-and-orange design and the basketball star’s name and Lock In motto.
Google says the Air is designed so you can easily switch bands to change your look for certain occasions. The company also promises a seamless data tracking experience if you switch between a Pixel Watch and a Fitbit Air, for instance, to use the latter for sleep tracking.
The Air tracks your activity, exercise, sleep, stress, and other key health metrics. Under the surface, it features an optical heart rate monitor, a three-axis accelerometer and gyroscope to track movement, a temperature sensor, and red and infrared sensors for blood oxygen saturation measurements. The Air doesn't have an integrated GPS for outdoor workouts like the Charge 6. It can monitor for Atrial Fibrillation (AFib, an irregular heartbeat) and has a built-in vibration motor for haptic feedback and alerts.
It’s meant to be lightweight, comfortable, and durable so that it’s pleasant to wear around the clock for holistic health tracking. The Fitbit Air is water-resistant to 164 feet.
The battery promises up to seven days of power on a charge. It can recharge from 0 to 100% in 90 minutes, and five minutes of charging is enough to power the device for a day. A week of battery life would put the Fitbit Air well ahead of most smartwatches and previous Fitbit devices. The Fitbit Charge 6 lasted only three days with the always-on display enabled during our testing. The Whoop 5.0, on the other hand, lasted for more than two weeks in testing and comes with a rechargeable battery pack so you never have to take the tracker off.
The Fitbit Air will be much more affordable than the Whoop 5.0, which requires a $239 annual subscription. The Whoop offers accurate and reliable exercise and sleep tracking, though its workout data lacks detail. As with the Whoop, you can manually start tracking a workout on the Fitbit Air in the app, or let the device automatically detect your activity. The Fitbit Air could be better than Whoop at exercise tracking if it's as detailed and reliable as previous Fitbit devices.
Google's AI Coach Takes Center Stage
The Fitbit Air's hardware may be minimal, but it leans heavily on Google's far more ambitious Health Coach software. From my early testing last year, it stood out as the most capable automated fitness coach I've used, largely because it builds workout plans naturally through conversation and adapts when your schedule shifts. That said, it wasn't flawless—workout syncing could be clunky, and its sleep guidance lagged behind its otherwise strong exercise insights. With Health Coach now moving out of preview, it'll be interesting to see how much of that has been refined.
Google says improvements are coming on both fronts. Sleep tracking is getting more granular, with nap detection and better nighttime analysis, while the assistant itself is designed to feel more responsive, delivering shorter, more useful replies in chat. The core experience remains the same: You'll start with a quick onboarding conversation about your goals, and the coach will build a plan to match. This time around, though, it's less rigid—focused more on weekly targets than prescriptive daily workouts, while still offering detailed suggestions on demand.
In practice, that flexibility was already one of its biggest strengths. During my testing, the coach easily worked around my two weekly personal training sessions, automatically logging them via the Pixel Watch 4 and suggesting additional workouts to fill out the week. The updated version goes further, letting you log sessions however you want—through a device like the Fitbit Air, by importing data from services like Peloton, or even by snapping a photo of a gym whiteboard and letting the AI parse the details.
That kind of adaptability is compelling, especially for anyone with a less structured routine. I’m still a bit skeptical about the sleep side of the equation. Better detection is a step forward, but to truly compete with more mature offerings from Samsung and Whoop, the coach will need to deliver deeper, more actionable guidance—not just cleaner data.
Fitbit's New Direction Won't Please Everyone
The new Google Health app will be organized into tabs for Fitness, Sleep, and Health, along with a main Today section summarizing your info. It will let you import data from third-party services, export medical records to share with your doctor, and compete with friends on expanded leaderboards for the highest step count and cardio load. While I liked the layout of the new app when testing it for Google Health Coach, I’m sure the shift in name and style will be jarring to longtime Fitbit fans.
Others might be disappointed that the Fitbit Air isn’t a direct update to popular lines like the Charge or Inspire. Google will continue to keep both the Inspire 3 and Charge 6 as part of its current lineup alongside the Air and the Pixel Watch 4.
Together, the Fitbit Air and the revamped app point to a clear new direction for Fitbit under Google's leadership. I'll be putting both the device and the fully developed Google Health Coach through their paces soon to evaluate how they hold up. Still, the idea of a more affordable alternative to Whoop, paired with guidance from Google's AI, is definitely intriguing. Stay tuned for my full review.