I flagged smart bands as one of the tech trends of 2026, based on what I was seeing, so it’s interesting to watch the rollout of the Fitbit Air and the buzz around the (still unconfirmed) Garmin Cirqa. Whoop, which has long been the undisputed leader in this area, now has a ton of competition. Here’s what I see going on, and what I think we should expect going forward.

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Fitness trackers have reached the end of their evolution, and their universe is rebooting

To explain how we got here, I’m going to take you through a little history lesson with the theme of: What do we expect a fitness tracker to be? Fitbit has been working on this question for over 15 years, beginning with simple digital pedometers that clipped to your pocket. As more advanced technology became more affordable, Fitbits gained lights and buttons and screens and heart rate sensors—the more you could pack into a device, the better. This evolution continued until some Fitbits were full-on smartwatches. To be honest, until about last year, I would have told you that there’s no longer any meaningful distinction between “smartwatches” and “fitness trackers”—they’ve merged into the same product category.

In parallel with that evolution, smartwatches and fitness watches also gained features, and then stagnated while trackers caught up. Garmins started off as bulky GPS units you could strap to your wrist; the Apple Watch was an extension of your smartphone that happened to be able to measure heart rate. Over time these categories merged into a single watch-shaped format that had an AMOLED screen, a heart rate sensor, and as many software features as the companies could figure out how to stuff into them. “Do I want an Apple Watch or a Garmin?” is a reasonable question to ask, since the overlap between fitness watches and smartwatches is an almost-but-not-quite-circular Venn diagram.

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But smartwatches, fitness watches, and fitness trackers have all arrived at roughly the same place: They have as many features as people want. In fact, they have more features than people want. The fastest marathon runner in the world seems to be perfectly happy with an old Garmin that was the bottom of the line when it launched five years ago.

Tech companies can no longer grow by reaching out to people who haven’t heard of smartwatches; most everybody who would want one already has one. Companies also have a hard time convincing people to upgrade the devices they already have, since newer models don’t have any killer features that older ones are missing.

These days, upgrades mostly consist of putting higher-end features in lower-end watches, which isn’t a strategy that can work for long. That brings us nice perks like the flashlight in Garmin’s Forerunner 970, but the result is that hardware companies like Garmin are ratcheting their hardware prices up, and wondering how they can make their money on something more profitable and longer-lasting, like subscriptions. (Garmin seems to be grasping for straws on subscription features as well, but that’s another story.)

Everybody can load an app onto their phone these days, so devices no longer need to stand alone. As a tech company, if all your fitness tracker's features are in the app, and your customers aren't excited about new hardware, you might as well go back to basics and offer a simple sensor on a strap. That's what we're seeing now.

How smart bands found their new niche

“Smart band” hasn’t been a tech category for long. Until recently there was only one major product in this area: the Whoop band. Whoop’s hardware was never all that fancy—just a heart rate sensor on a strap. The clasp and the charger were (and are) both cleverly designed, and the focus is on everything but the electronic internals. You get device for “free”—it’s the app that keeps you engaged, and the app that makes you feel you’re getting $239/year of value out of it.

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My review of the Whoop 4.0 (no longer the current model) is worth a read if you want to see how this played out over time. In the two years I had that band in my possession, its app gained a ton of new features. Whoop markets itself to athletes who want to monitor their recovery and optimize their sleep schedules, and the app has always provided a treasure trove of data alongside tools to highlight what’s most important to focus on.

But not everybody wants to pay that subscription fee, or think of themselves as athletes hyper-optimizing their routine. For years, people would pop up on tech forums asking if there was a way to get a similar

New Smart Bands Are Coming, and Whoop Is Scared