Google recently released the Fitbit Air after years of controversy. Post-acquisition in 2021, Google pretty quickly lost a lot of goodwill with brand loyalists. It effectively gutted Fitbit by getting rid of favorite community features, ending multiple popular device lines, and kiboshing the website — all while putting its beloved Pixel Watch lineup on a pedestal. Now we have the Fitbit Air, a seeming competitor to popular Whoop fitness trackers that makes you wonder if Fitbit is back, baby. It is. Kinda. But there are some things you should know before you buy.
All in all, the Google Fitbit Air looks like an excellent device, but we wouldn’t rush out to buy it just based on the marketing alone. If you’re reading this, you’re probably trying to make up your mind, so you are no doubt already well aware of the AI-heavy health coach side of the device. We won’t discuss if that part’s worth it. Instead, we’ll consider some caveats — some less obvious, some hidden in the documentation — that might make or break this device for you.
Your smartphone is basically the only way you interact with it
While a good chunk of people buy a smartwatch for their fitness journey, another equally large chunk just buys it to get notifications on their wrist. Smartwatches do an excellent job of being an extension of your smartphone. The Google Fitbit Air does not. Obviously, you can see with your eyes that there’s no screen on the device like previous Fitbit versions, and consequentially, there’s almost no way to interact with it. The Fitbit Air conveys virtually everything through the Google Health app on your smartphone.
And that’s going to be the beauty of it for some people. Just put the band on your wrist and forget about it, letting it quietly and unobtrusively track your activity in the background. Many would argue that in a world of so many distracting screens, a device without yet another attention-grabbing screen is a good thing — and to others, a dealbreaker.
The Google Fitbit Air isn’t entirely bereft of user interaction. There’s a status light that tells you the charge levels and update status. Additionally, the watch vibrates for your morning alarm, which is also the only time that you would physically interact with it; double-tapping turns off the alarm. Aside from that one small exception, there’s no tapping or swiping to start workouts, or vibrations to tell you you’ve got a new notification. It all depends on you. But the simple inability to check the time, for example, could make this a no-go.
It works without a subscription
The $99 price tag of the Fitbit Air looks to some like a great deal, and to others like a concerning indicator that the real cost is a subscription shoehorned in later. That is true to an extent. To experience your Google Fitbit Air to its “fullest,” you need to spend $9.99 a month (or $100 a year) for the Google Health Premium plan. Here’s the good news: depending on your view of AI, you may not actually be missing out on much.
Google Health Premium is largely AI features. Your subscription buys you full access to the AI coach, the bespoke fitness plans it creates, and other health trends that it opines on, like your sleeping habits. For all intents and purposes, Google Health’s Premium plan is just a chatbot built around your health. You do also get access to some human-curated workouts and mindfulness sessions, but that’s only icing on the cake.
If you don’t subscribe, you’ll still get a fully functional device. The watch can be used for free just to see the raw numbers of your activity, your sleep, your vitals, and any other personally logged information. Google Gemini struggles dearly with objective, factual things (as all LLMs do), so if you’re skeptical of chatbots, then Google Health Premium is more of a dodged bullet than a paywalled feature.
Water sports do not seem to be a primary focus
Make no mistake, the Google Fitbit Air can be used for swimming. Its spec sheet boasts water resistance up to 50 meters of depth, and you can buy a silicone band rather than the default fabric one. It does also support different strokes when swimming, as well as laps and pool length. In the footnotes, however, Google says it does not “guarantee continued water resistance for the lifespan of the product.” None of the promotional imagery for the Google Health app shows anyone swimming, and anecdotal user evidence seems to suggest it doesn’t do well in that realm. For those who plan to do a lot of water-based workouts, plenty of other waterproof smartwatches will better suit water sports.
Compare it to something like the Apple Watch, which has dedicated swim workouts and a built-in water-clearing mode. Some models like the Apple Watch Ultra practically beg you to swim with them in promotional material, and boast swimmer-oriented hardware features like 100-meter water resistance, a water temperature sensor, and an automatic depth gauge for diving. Having a screen also is extremely useful if you want to know how many laps you’ve done and how far you’ve gone. We don’t have to explain why it’s not ideal to leave your smartphone poolside and stop your laps midway to check your progress with wet fingers.
Let us be abundantly clear: we’re not saying that you can’t swim with this watch or that you shouldn’t swim with this watch. What we are saying is that there are arguably much better smartwatches for frequent swimmers, given how limited swim-focused data is on the Fitbit Air, how absent swimming is in the marketing, and the heavy disclaimers in the spec sheets seemingly discouraging it.
iOS is supported
Many are likely aware that Apple Watches refuse to pair with Android phones and can only be tricked into doing so by a workaround — and even then, they don’t give you the full breadth of their features. It’s kind of the same with Android smartwatches on iPhone, just in reverse. While they do work, Apple has a history of limiting certain features and only bending when regulatory agencies step in. Luckily, the Google Fitbit Air is supported on iPhones and should work flawlessly.
Just download the Google Health app, and your Fitbit should work on any iPhone as long as it’s running at least iOS 16.4. Further issues that would typically cause headaches with other Android smartwatches likely won’t be a problem here at all, since you don’t have the hardware for them to even be an issue; integration roadblocks preventing the receipt of notifications, interacting with them, sending SMS over iMessage via smartwatch, etc., have no impact whatsoever on the Fitbit. As long as your Google Fitbit Air is connected over Bluetooth, it can feed its health metrics directly into Google Health. That in and of itself may be a huge selling point for iPhone users who have been frustrated in the past with Android smartwatches.
There’s no built-in location tracking
It’s common for smartwatches to include their own GPS for location tracking. Super helpful if you want to see how far you’ve gone (and where you’ve gone) during a walk, run, swim, or other physical activity where distance and location matter. Unfortunately, the Google Fitbit Air does not have any built-in GPS. Instead, all location tracking is done via the app on your phone using location permissions. So you can check out distance, speed, and location, but your phone is doing it, not the Fitbit.
Why does this matter? Well, for one, you’re gonna have to take your smartphone with you on your walks and runs if you care about location-based metrics; presumably you’ll want to know how many miles you’ve gone. A huge part of the appeal of a smartwatch is that you can leave your smartphone at home for morning jogs and night walks and still track your location and distance.
Further, gym shorts or tights are not exactly famous for keeping a smartphone secure when your legs are in motion. Going out, you’d need to get an arm strap or a bag, which means you can’t just go with the clothes on your back, the Fitbit, and nothing else. This kind of puts a damper on how small, lightweight, and unobtrusive the Fitbit is, which would otherwise make it perfect for outside cardio. Having said that, a lot of other fitness trackers in the $100 range nix GPS as well. Whether or not this is a downside depends on how much that location information matters to you.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
