Google is retiring one of the most recognizable names in consumer wearables. On May 7, 2026, the company announced that the Fitbit brand will be phased out in favor of a new subscription product called Gemini Health Coach, an AI-driven coaching service that goes live on May 19, 2026, at $9.99 a month. Alongside the software shift, Google is introducing a new $99.99 tracker called the Fitbit Air, a budget device meant to funnel new users into the Gemini ecosystem even as the Fitbit name itself fades from marketing.
From Step-Counter to AI Coach
Fitbit built its identity over more than a decade as a step-counting pioneer, later expanding into sleep tracking and heart-rate monitoring after Google acquired the company in 2021 for $2.1 billion. The rebrand marks the clearest signal yet that Google intends to fold Fitbit’s hardware and data pipeline entirely into its Gemini AI assistant line, rather than operate it as a standalone wearables brand. According to the announcement on Google’s blog, the new Health Coach service uses Gemini’s conversational AI to interpret sleep, activity, and heart-rate data and deliver personalized, ongoing guidance rather than static dashboards.
What’s Actually Changing on May 19
Starting May 19, 2026, existing Fitbit Premium subscribers will be migrated toward the new $9.99-per-month Gemini Health Coach tier, which promises daily check-ins, adaptive workout and recovery suggestions, and natural-language conversations about a user’s health metrics. The Fitbit Air, priced at $99.99, is positioned as an entry-level tracker aimed at price-sensitive buyers who might otherwise choose a cheaper competitor, giving Google a low-cost feeder device for its subscription business.
Why Google Is Making the Move Now
The timing follows a broader industry pattern: nearly every major wearable maker has spent 2025 and 2026 racing to attach generative AI coaching layers to hardware that used to be sold on the strength of sensors alone. Google’s own Gemini assistant has been expanding into health contexts throughout 2025, and folding Fitbit’s decade of biometric data collection into that assistant gives Google a defensible data advantage against Whoop, Samsung, and Apple, all of which have announced competing AI health features in the same window. Retiring the Fitbit name outright, rather than simply layering Gemini on top of it, suggests Google wants the product associated with its flagship AI brand rather than a legacy fitness-tracker identity that may carry less weight in an AI-first market.
Praise and Pushback
Supporters of the move argue that folding coaching into a conversational AI interface is a genuine improvement over the graph-heavy dashboards that defined the original Fitbit app, making health data more actionable for casual users who never dug into detailed metrics. Critics, however, point to the retirement of a beloved and trusted brand name as a risk: some longtime Fitbit users have expressed frustration on social channels about losing a name they associate with reliability, and there are broader concerns about Google consolidating even more granular, longitudinal health data — sleep patterns, heart rates, activity logs going back years — into an AI system with unclear long-term data-use policies. Privacy advocates have also questioned whether a $9.99 monthly fee for AI coaching functions that were previously bundled into Fitbit Premium represents a genuine upgrade or simply a repackaged price increase.
Where This Fits in the Bigger AI-Wearable Race
The rebrand lands amid a crowded 2026 field: Whoop is rolling out on-demand clinician access, Apple is adding AI-driven sleep-sound detection to its Watch line, and Samsung is introducing an AI “aging biomarker” on Galaxy Watch. Every major player is converging on the same thesis — that raw biometric tracking is now table stakes, and the real competitive battleground is the AI layer that turns that data into personalized coaching, and eventually into monetizable subscription revenue.
What’s Next
The immediate test will be whether Fitbit’s existing user base — accustomed to a distinct brand identity and a simpler subscription — tolerates the transition to a Gemini-branded, AI-first experience without significant churn. Google will also need to demonstrate that Gemini Health Coach delivers meaningfully better outcomes than the algorithmic coaching Fitbit already offered, especially as regulators and consumers grow more scrutinous of AI health claims across the industry. If the Fitbit Air succeeds as a low-cost gateway device, it could become the template for how Google monetizes hardware broadly: cheap sensors, expensive AI subscriptions. Longer term, watch for whether Google eventually merges Gemini Health Coach with other Google Health initiatives, and whether the retirement of the Fitbit name proves to be a one-off rebrand or the start of Google methodically erasing acquired brand identities in favor of a unified Gemini-first product strategy.
