Google launches screenless Fitbit Air with Gemini AI coach for $100

Google has officially unveiled the Fitbit Air, a $100 screenless fitness band that challenges the design of Whoop’s popular hardware while cutting its subscription cost by more than half. The device is paired with a Gemini-powered AI health coach priced at $10 per month, marking a significant shift in how Google approaches the wearable market. The launch coincides with a forced migration of Fitbit data to Google accounts by May 19 and a rebranding of Fitbit’s software as Google Health, which has already raised fresh privacy concerns about how the company handles sensitive health information.

Google acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion in 2021, spent the next three years dismantling the brand, and now hopes to revive it with a device that has no screen, no buttons, and no standalone functionality. The Fitbit Air consists of a soft fabric band with a five-gram sensor pack underneath, tracking heart rate, steps, sleep, blood oxygen saturation, and heart rate variability. It cannot show notifications, make calls, or even tell you the time. Instead, it feeds data into the new Google Health app, which uses a Gemini-based AI health coach to interpret metrics, design workout plans, analyze photos of meals for macronutrient content, and deliver personalized coaching for a monthly fee. The device launches on May 26, with preorders starting Thursday. The product Google is really selling is not a fitness band , it is a subscription.

The Fitbit Air weighs just 12 grams with the strap and five grams without, making it lighter than most smart rings. Its battery lasts seven days, and a five-minute fast charge provides a full day of use. Available in four colors , obsidian, fog, lavender, and berry , with additional straps for $35, the band relies on haptic feedback for alarms and a small LED for battery status. It supports voice input for logging activity and meals but cannot audibly respond. The device can also detect atrial fibrillation, a feature that has become standard across recent wearables after years of regulatory clearance. The removable sensor pack clips into the fabric band, a design unmistakably modeled on Whoop’s hardware architecture.

The resemblance to Whoop is no coincidence. Whoop, which raised $575 million in March at a $10.1 billion valuation, built its business on the idea that a screenless wearable focused on recovery, strain, and sleep data can command premium subscription revenue without the distraction of notifications or apps. Whoop does not charge for hardware but requires an annual subscription starting at $200. Google’s Fitbit has been developing health monitoring capabilities, including FDA-cleared atrial fibrillation detection algorithms, that bring it closer to the clinical-grade data Whoop and Oura users rely on. The Fitbit Air’s $100 price and optional $10 monthly subscription undercut Whoop’s annual cost by more than half and Oura’s $349 ring by more than two-thirds, while offering a comparable sensor suite. The real question is whether the AI coach can deliver insights that justify the ongoing cost, or whether most users will stick with the free tier and treat the device as a basic tracker.

The software side of the announcement is equally significant. The rebranding of Fitbit’s ecosystem as Google Health introduces a new app available on both iOS and Android, structured into four tabs: Today, Fitness, Sleep, and Health. It provides standard metrics like steps, calories, sleep stages, and vital signs, with manual logging for meals and menstrual cycles, plus data sharing options. The free tier covers all tracking features. The $10 monthly subscription unlocks the Google Health Coach, a Gemini-powered AI assistant that analyzes sensor data in the context of a user’s stated goals and offers coaching recommendations. Users can upload photos of meals for calorie and macronutrient assessment, leveraging Gemini’s multimodal vision models.

Rishi Chandra, who leads Google’s wearables and health division, described the Health Coach as the beginning of a platform strategy. “We want every hardware product we’re building, from the Pixel Watch to the full Fitbit portfolio, to really optimise around this Health Coach,” he said. Google has invested tens of billions of dollars in AI capabilities, from its own Gemini models to a reported $40 billion investment in Anthropic. The Health Coach represents one of the first consumer applications designed to convert that AI investment into recurring subscription revenue through a mass-market hardware device. Chandra’s analogy , that the Health Coach aims to give ordinary users the support structure of a professional athlete’s nutritionist, sleep coach, and fitness trainer , articulates the value proposition. The execution depends on whether Gemini can produce health insights that are consistently useful rather than generically encouraging, a distinction that will determine whether users continue paying after the three-month free trial included with the device.

The wristband market the Fitbit Air enters is dominated by Chinese manufacturers. Xiaomi controls roughly half the global wristband market, according to IDC, followed by Huawei at about a quarter and Samsung at 10 percent. Fitbit holds about six percent. Whoop, despite its $10 billion valuation, holds only two percent. The market grew 14.7 percent in 2025, driven primarily by Xiaomi’s focus on affordability and scale. The Fitbit Air’s $100 price positions it above the cheapest Xiaomi bands, which start below $30, but well below the premium segment where Whoop and Oura operate. The strategic positioning is clear: Google is targeting the gap between budget Chinese bands and premium health trackers, offering AI-driven insights at a price point neither end of the market currently serves.

The European Commission is preparing to force Google to open Android to rival AI assistants, a regulatory action that could affect how Google Health and its Gemini-powered coach can be bundled as default experiences on Android devices. But the Fitbit Air’s cross-platform strategy, launching simultaneously on iOS and Android, suggests Google is positioning Health as a standalone product rather than an Android exclusive. Chandra described the Fitbit brand as Google’s primary wearable for a broader audience, with the Pixel Watch reserved for committed Pixel and Android users. The distinction matters: Fitbit’s historical strength was its platform neutrality, and the decision to launch Google Health on iOS signals that Google views the subscription revenue as more valuable than ecosystem lock-in.

The launch also coincides with a deadline that underscores the tensions in Google’s health data strategy. Fitbit users who have not migrated their data to a Google account by May 19 will lose access to the Fitbit platform entirely, with data deletion beginning on July 15. The deadline, originally set for 2025, was extended to February 2026, then pushed again to May after user pushback. The forced migration converts Fitbit’s health data , years of sleep records, heart rate trends, activity logs, and weight measurements , from a standalone health platform into a dataset attached to a Google account. Google has committed to keeping health data separate from Google Ads and has said it will not use the data for advertising purposes. Seven EU countries have accused Google of violating GDPR through user tracking, and the migration of sensitive health data into Google’s account infrastructure raises the same category of privacy questions that regulators across Europe have been asking about the company’s data practices for years.

Google’s history of discontinuing products casts a shadow over the Fitbit Air launch that no amount of marketing can dispel. The company has killed more than 290 products and services, from Google Reader to Google Plus to Stadia, and the three-year silence between Fitbit’s last major hardware launch and the Air has already prompted questions about whether the brand was being wound down. Chandra’s statement that the Fitbit Air marks “the beginning of a resurgence” for Fitbit is precisely the kind of commitment Google has made before abandoning products. The difference this time may be the subscription model. Google Health at $10 a month, attached to a hardware device that costs $100, creates recurring revenue that Google’s previous consumer products, many of which were free or one-time purchases, did not generate. The Fitbit Air is Google’s cheapest bet on consumer health. The AI coach is its most ambitious.

And the question that will determine both products’ survival is whether a company that has never sustained a consumer subscription business outside of YouTube can build one around a device that cannot even tell you the time.