We’ve seen the headlines: Google’s Fitbit Air - the Whoop killer!

And there’s some justification to the claim: the hardware is really good, generally accurate on par with devices like Whoop and Amazfit’s Helio Strap, but it has an Achille’s Heal in the form of the Google Health app.

Now, it isn’t terrible, you can live with it, but for a ‘premium’ health app from a brand as big as Google well, it just looks a bit… Fisher Price. And that’s without even mentioning the AI, which dominates the premium version of Google Health, but which is prone to fantasies and gets very obsessed about whether your partner stayed over or not and that’s why your sleep score is up or down.

But I have got used to it and, for the price point, I’m happy with it. 

And then I saw another post that said: Fitbit Air + Bevel = Whoop Killer!

I’ve known about Bevel for a long time but I’m an Android user, for my sins, and I’ll die on the hill with my Pixel 10 Pro before you move me to an iPhone. Not because I’m anti-iOS, but I am just so embedded in the Google ecosystem that I really don’t want to change.

Why isn’t Bevel on Android? Well, it’s because Bevel is apparently designed specifically to integrate with Apple Health and the Apple Watch hardware, and relies on proprietary iOS integrations to generate advanced strain and recovery metrics…

Except I do have an iPad so, out of curiosity, I installed Bevel and connected it to my Google Health account and: FML - here’s a genuine Whoop alternative for people who don’t want to pay Whoop’s prices.

What is this BS about needing to be proprietarily integrated into Apple’s health eco system? Everything is there. There’s no integration with Apple Health or the Apple Watch, because I haven’t got Apple Health set up and I don’t own an Apple Watch. And yet Bevel has everything and more that I need in a much nicer interface than Google Health.

Yes, the app is brilliant. Yes, it looks so Whoop that it’s no surprise Whoop have raised a suit against them. Yes, as an ex-Whoop user I would fall in love with Bevel straight away. And all they need to do is port their app over to Android.

So, are Bevel missing an incredible opportunity to clear up the health app market for people who just want a straightforward tracker and clean, easy to understand app?

If this was available on Android I would pay the annual fee without blinking. $99 (£85 uk) one off cost for the Fitbit Air and then $99 per year subscription for Bevel (instead of $99 for Google Health Premium)? Versus Whoop’s annual subscription fees starting at $199 per year for the entry tier and about $350 for the top?

Come on Bevel. Take my money. All you’ve got to do is put it on Android. And then you would have the Whoop Killer.

Yesterday was a busy day. I was on my feet all day at Silverstone, having a fab day and eating a lot of crap.

At the end of the day, the nutrition graph in the app showed I was 590 calories short. But it also says my target was 2071 to 2289 and I had an intake of 2880.

That, at first glance, is a surplus.

Now I do know how calorie intake Vs calorie burn works so I suspected the answer probably was that because I'd been on my feet all day, done over 20k steps, and had had a large calorie burn for the day that it was probably saying I'd not eaten enough to maintain my energy levels.

But is it me or is the nutrition graph not making its calculation as clear?

Other apps show show the burn v intake a lot clearer than this, I think.

I was going to attach an example of what the AI said and what the graph said but such content apparently breaks the rules so here's a paste of the AI's response to this query:

The reason the graph shows you as under target despite having a high calorie intake is due to the Active energy burned of 1,349 kcal recorded yesterday.

The app calculates your status using a "net calorie" approach. Instead of just looking at the food you ate, it considers the energy you burned through activity as a "credit" that offsets your intake.

Here is how that specific 540 kcal "under" number is reached:

•

Total Intake: 2,880 kcal

•

Active Burn: -1,349 kcal

•

Net Calories: 1,531 kcal

The app then compares this net value (1,531 kcal) to the lower end of your daily target range (2,071 kcal). Since 1,531 is 540 kcal lower than 2,071, the graph reports that you are "under target" by exactly that amount. Essentially, your high level of activity yesterday "earned" you a much higher calorie budget than your standard daily range.

I do like the Google Health app. I've warmed up to it. But it's still acting like a beta product I think.

I know this sub is currently full of fans and haters and I’m desperately wanting to be the former than the latter. But after the last 24 hours with the AI Coach I just decided to send the below to Fitbit support. I highly doubt they’ll read it. If they do, I hope it puts a smile on their face, at the very least, but I also hope they pay a bit of attention to it. Because honestly, right now, I’m regretting buying the Fitbit Air, even though the Fitbit Air is the device I want.

Dear Google,

I’ve no idea if you’re still monitoring this email address at all or not but I wanted to get in touch regarding Google Health.

I moved away from Fitbit a few years ago because I didn’t want a screen on my arm; I kept my Charge 6 purely for runs and moved to Whoop for screen less tracking. I always thought that if Google/Fitbit brought out a screen less tracker, I’d move back.

When Amazfit brought out the Helio Strap I moved there because the Whoop subscription is insane.

Throughout it all, I have always been a loyal Google customer. I’ve had a Gmail account since I received my first invite c.2004, and I really wish you’d never shut down Wave; I have a Pixel 10 Pro, my house is littered with so many Google Home devices, cameras, and thermostats that my partner is borderline paranoid about any noise she might make in the house, and when the Fitbit Air was announced I whooped with joy and pre-ordered straightaway. I even switched up my Charge 6 to a Pixel Watch 3 (second hand; I really only want it for when I’m exercising). I have an AI One subscription, so Gemini Pro is my LLM of choice, and it recently helped me win a court case against an auto dealer. 

And then I started using Google Health. I know you’re trying to build the best architected health and wellbeing solution but honestly, this is an AI car crash. Which version of Gemini is it running - it’s borderline Bard territory.

The app itself is missing so much functionality that was in Fitbit/Google Fit it’s almost offensive to your loyal customer base.

It was touted as being device agnostic, happy to read any activity from another device, but it doesn’t really. It’ll pull in the base measurements, but nothing else and even the AI will just ignore all the stats that are sitting in Health Connect.

And what has happened to blood pressure recording? I have hypertension and recorded my blood pressure in Google Fit regularly; there’s no way of doing this in Google Health (the irony of the name…) but if I ask the Coach it says it can do it if I just tell it, and then when I tell it it says it can’t do it.

Logging nutrition is painful. It used to be easy in Fitbit and worked properly and now it just makes up the calories and you have no way of storing regular foods and drinks so if you eat something similar regularly (let’s say a breakfast routine) you have to type it in manually each time. And each time it guesses a slightly different kcal amount.

And then there’s its persistent memory. And I mean persistent. Last night it told me that it thought I might not be ready for the Newmarket half marathon this coming Sunday. I told it I’d already run the Newmarket half marathon on 31st May, which it then acknowledged and said that it had made a mistake. When I woke up this morning, the post-sleep analysis asked me if my good sleep meant I felt ready for my Newmarket half marathon on Sunday. 

I reminded it again that I have already run that race and I have nothing planned this weekend. I did tell it that I’ve got an event on the 11th October, which it immediately had cerebral apoplexy over and wanted to start a full on military training plan with me at bedtime. 

And then I went for a swim this morning. When it recorded the results it told me that was a fantastic way to prepare my legs for my upcoming Newmarket half marathon on Sunday…

I made the mistake once of telling it that one night my partner had stayed over and commented on the fact that I’d seemed to stop breathing in the night and now the AI asks me everyday if she stayed over and if she noticed any more breathing issues in the night. I’m beginning to think it’s got a thing for her.

The Amazfit Zepp app with the Helio Strap actually reports on apnea and the Google Health (note, health) app doesn’t. It could stop asking me if she stayed over if only it could read the information for itself.

I really, really want to like this app. I don’t mind the design - design is subjective and ultimately everybody will get used to it - and we all know these apps and devices are for guidance only. But if the AI doesn’t shut up soon I am going to poke sticks in its eyes.

Go have a read of the Fitbit sub over on Reddit. Yes, I know Reddit is the Mos Eisley Spaceport of the Internet, but at least you will find there a lot of people who are desperately wanting to enjoy the app as much as me, and as much as they enjoyed the old Fitbit app, but right now they want to strap Bard to a bonfire and set it alight. 

Yours, a faithful Fitbit fan,

TL;DR: Fitbit Air hardware is excellent, but Google Health app is a disappointment. It's not truly device agnostic, the AI Coach hallucinates data, food logging has regressed, and there's no blood pressure tracking. Fine for casual use if you're not a data nerd, but Whoop remains the gold standard for serious users and the Helio Strap or Polar Loop are better mid-range options. For me it's just about good enough, mainly because I prefer the Air's form factor.

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I've been using the new app for a couple of days now (since my Fitbit Air arrived and I could use the app properly) and parts of it are slowly starting to grow on me.

I had been a Fitbit user for years but just didn't want to be wearing a screen all the time (I have plenty of screens in my life; another on my wrist was just unnecessary) so a couple of years ago I bit the bullet and went to Whoop.

I've had Whoop, Amazfit Helio Strap, and now I'm back with Fitbit and the Air.

Hardware wise, I think the Air is excellent. And I love its more discreet form factor than other screen-less devices on the market.

But the Google Health app still has some way to go versus the competitors.

Google positioned the new Health app as device agnostic, but it isn't really. I get Fitbit/Google Health Premium as part of my Google AI One subscription, which I'm currently also getting free as a bundle with my Pixel 10. But even though I've got Premium, before the Air arrived I had no access to the Health Coach, and data ingested from third party devices like Amazfit was minimal. Enough for the app to say "you did a run today, well done." "You slept last night, well done". And frustratingly, users who were on the preview but didn't have a Fitbit device had access to the Health Coach and lost it when the public release came out.

That isn't "device agnostic". When other apps like Sonar or even proprietary apps can pull in more data, Google has missed a trick here. It doesn't even pull in GPS/map data from my runs.

Now the Air is connected to it, there's more data available to me (from the Air; third party data is still rubbish) and the Health Coach is now available. And it still feels a bit Fisher Price in its approach.

Sleep, steps, and heart rate measurements all seem very accurate, which is great, but understanding it in the app isn't as easy as it should be. It's heavily reliant on the AI Coach, which wants to be your best friend, never forgets the pint you had on Wednesday night, and is prone to making stuff up: Yesterday it praised me on my excellent sleep score of 82 and when I pointed out the actual sleep score was 74 it told me well done for catching it out, and then made up some other nonsense about the sleep. And after a run logged with my Active 2, it initially correctly logged the 8.25k distance, but then conflated it with the automatically tracked steps of the Fitbit Air and said I'd run just shy of 10km; when I corrected it, I got a Frankenstein version of both sets of numbers. Thank God Strava kept the hard data from Amazfit.

Fitbit staples like food logging and calorie burn Vs consumption aren't there properly any more (if you have saved regular foods from your old Fitbit you can still find them); instead you need to enter the details manually into the Health Coach and even then it will come back with estimates; and there's no way of saving regular foods.

And, for a Health app, it's not able to log or pull in blood pressure data - surely a basic staple of any health app tracking.

For a product that's supposed to be the amalgamation of the best of Google Fit and Fitbit, it instead feels like they released a beta version of the product and ignored user feedback from the preview release.

Now, I am a casual user. While I run and cycle and swim, I do only really want a guide of how I'm doing. I don't dig into the data in detail, so I'm actually finding most of Google Health okay for my daily use. I wish it was more configurable, I wish it had blood pressure tracking, and one of my favourite features of Whoop was the journal - you can sort of do this with the Health Coach but it does get a bit judgy, and if you mention anything about having sex it gets very prudish and tells you it can't log that.

So if you're considering using Google Health as your wellness app but are serious about digging into the data, it's not the app for you right now. For me, it's okay, but mostly because I do like the Fitbit Air size over the competitors.

If you like your data but don't have a champagne budget, the Helio Strap, Polar Loop are probably more for you (or wait for Garmin's release).

If you're serious, and can afford it, go Whoop.

Now, what I have to do is decide whether it's worth swapping my Amazfit Active 2 for a Fitbit Sense 2 for logging my runs.

I sort of understand the decision to just rebrand Fitbit to Google Health, meaning users have not had to download a new app etc.

BUT, by doing so, it means Google Health carries the legacy average 4* review in Google's Play Store from ~1m reviews and 4.5* from ~133000 reviews on Apples App Store.

Which is a misnomer for new users coming fresh to the app, because the reviews praise the old Fitbit app and disguise the negative reviews of the new UI.

I wrote a review a couple of years ago giving the Fitbit app 3* because I never really got on with the refresh they did around then.

And I haven't updated my review yet because I'm waiting for my Air to arrive tomorrow - even though I'm a Premium user because of other subscriptions, I don't have access to the Health Coach because I don't have a Fitbit device connected, and it doesn't do a good enough job of ingesting data from other sources.

So my initial impression is to downgrade my rating further - especially based on the negative views I've seen on here so far. (That said, Reddit is the Mos Eisley Spaceport of the internet and it's rare to find true praise on here...)

But if I downgrade my rating, would it really have an impact? After all, it's just an update of an existing review so it won't surface like a new review would and legacy reviews will keep the ratings high.

Which makes it a clever move by Google - they've pushed the app out as an easy way to move all Fitbit users over to their new tool, while successfully launching a potentially substandard product without tanking their own reviews.

Are any other UK users experiencing issues with the new Health app, especially around not getting access to Ask Coach?

I did a check with Gemini and it says it's still waiting regulatory compliance, which wasn't exactly made clear to those of us UK based people purchasing a Fitbit Air...

1. Regional Availability and the UK Regulatory Review

While Google announced that the Google Health Coach is expanding to 37 countries, the UK roll-out is hitting a slight snag due to local healthcare app regulations.

Because the Coach can ingest health data and offer personalized advice, the conversational "Ask Coach" feature is undergoing a staggered launch in the UK. Many UK users are finding that while they have the new four-tab Google Health layout, the Gemini-powered conversational features are temporarily hidden until the regional activation passes regulatory compliance.

EDIT: after uninstalling and reinstalling I got a notification that advised Ask Coach isn't available to me yet. I dug into it and in my case it's because I haven't got a Fitbit or Pixel device attached to it (yet); so it's not as device agnostic as advertised. Hopefully it'll activate when my Air arrives.