Fitbit, Garmin, or Apple Watch: Where Fitness Wearables Stand Right Before I/O
A look at the fitness-tracker landscape ahead of Google I/O, where Wear OS is expected to get a Fitbit-powered overhaul.
Google I/O kicks off in about a week, and the rumor mill has been pretty consistent for months now: Wear OS is finally getting the overhaul it desperately needs, and Fitbit’s health-tracking software is going to be at the center of it. Google closed its Fitbit acquisition back in January, and since then Wear OS has basically been sitting still while everyone waits to see what Google actually does with the tech it bought. Seems like a good moment to take stock of where fitness wearables actually stand right now, before that news potentially resets the conversation.
Right now the market splits pretty cleanly into two camps. If you want a dedicated fitness tracker — something built primarily around step counts, heart rate, sleep tracking and workout logging rather than notifications and apps — Fitbit and Garmin are still the names people reach for. Fitbit’s strength has always been ease of use and a clean app that doesn’t overwhelm casual users, while Garmin owns the serious-athlete end of the market with GPS accuracy and battery life that regularly stretches into days or weeks rather than hours.
Then there’s the general smartwatch category, where Apple Watch is the clear leader. It’s not the best pure fitness tracker on the market — Garmin still beats it on multi-day battery life, and dedicated trackers are usually cheaper and less fussy — but Apple has done a good job making it good enough at fitness while being genuinely useful as a phone-companion device. That combination is hard to beat for most buyers.
Wear OS, meanwhile, has been the odd one out. Samsung mostly does its own thing with Tizen on Galaxy Watches, and the rest of the Wear OS hardware ecosystem has felt stagnant for a while — device makers haven’t had much reason to invest heavily when the platform itself hasn’t been getting meaningful health-tracking upgrades. That’s exactly the gap Fitbit’s software could fill.
What I’m watching for at I/O
The obvious question is how deep the Fitbit integration goes. Does Google just bolt Fitbit’s tracking algorithms onto existing Wear OS health APIs, or does it rebuild the whole health stack around Fitbit’s approach to sleep scores, stress tracking and activity recognition — the stuff Fitbit users actually like about the ecosystem? There’s also the hardware question: does this come bundled with a first-party Pixel Watch, something that’s been rumored for years without ever materializing?
If Google gets this right, it could finally give Wear OS a real identity instead of just being “the Android answer to Apple Watch” in name only. If it’s a half-measure, expect the same complaints that have followed the platform for years — decent hardware from Fossil, Mobvoi and others held back by software that just isn’t competitive. We’ll know a lot more in a matter of days.