Two "Whoop Killers" in Two Weeks? Don't Trust the Headlines.

The Fitbit Air launched on May 7, 2026. By the next morning, the consumer tech press had already declared WHOOP dead, predicted the collapse of the subscription model, and announced a structural shift in the wearables market.

DC Rainmaker ran a piece titled “Whoop On The Defensive.”[1] Lifehacker called the Fitbit Air “a Whoop killer.”[2] One Substack analyst wrote that “Whoop faces a significant pricing problem since its entire business model relies on a recurring subscription with no $99 entry point.”[3] The takes coming out of fitness blogs and tech publications largely landed on the same conclusion: Google undercut the subscription model, the wearable category is about to commoditize, and the specialty players are exposed.

I read all of these takes, and I’d argue most of them are wrong, or at a minimum missing the point, especially now that we’re starting to see headlines about a new disruptor, Luna.

Have you heard of the Luna Band? It opened its waitlist on May 22, saying it will ship the end of July for the price of $149 with no subscription, no screen, and the first voice AI interface. The product is a health intelligence brand out of India that’s already shipping a smart ring in the same family.[4]

Both Leonard Rinser, a health futurist and managing partner at Venture Institute,[5] and Bas Duijnstee, cofounder of The Longevity Score,[6] posted almost identical LinkedIn posts on the Luna launch in the last week. But I won’t be quoting them here because they are so obviously either AI-slop or cribbed almost verbatim from a press kit, or both, that it’s ridiculous. Proof in point: they both have this exact same line, “The interesting question is not whether Luna outsells Whoop…” Both also hit the same three-point structure (screen fatigue is real, subscription fatigue is real, voice as a primary health interface is finally usable) with nearly identical phrasing. Rinser cites “C+R Research, West Monroe” for US subscription spend; Duijnstee cites Deloitte for European subscription fatigue.

I don’t have a way to confirm paid placement from inside this conversation. What I can tell you is that the pattern is consistent with one of two things, and probably both: Luna is running a coordinated influencer push for the waitlist launch, and at least one of these posts is heavily AI-assisted.

But this doesn’t preclude the fact that those are three very interesting points to make.

So now we have two waves of “Whoop killer” headlines stacked on top of each other inside a two-week window. But I think that what the consumer tech press is calling commoditization isn’t commoditization, it’s a real wave of innovation across multiple form factors and multiple business models, with several credible players who haven’t even fully shown their hand yet.

A screenless wristband at $99.99, shipping May 26. It offers up to a week of battery life with heart rate, sleep, recovery, and daily readiness scoring. It comes with a three-month free trial of Google Health Premium, the rebranded version of Fitbit Premium.[7]

The “no subscription” framing falls apart fairly quickly though. Google Health Premium costs $9.99 per month or $99 per year, and it’s where the AI-powered Google Health Coach lives. The Health Coach is the feature Google is actually selling. The hardware is the entry point.[7][8] A buyer can use the Fitbit Air at a basic level without ever subscribing, but the product Google built and is marketing is the AI coaching experience, and that experience sits behind a paywall.

What’s different about Google’s approach is really in the branding and what’s going on with the overall platform. The Fitbit app is being rebranded into Google Health. Google Health Premium is bundled into Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra subscriptions, which means consumers paying for Google’s broader AI products will get Health Premium at no incremental cost.[9] Google has also publicly committed that Google Health will eventually accept data from third-party wearables, including Apple Watch, Garmin, WHOOP, and Oura, with Garmin step and sleep ingestion already in beta.[10] So ultimately they’re hoping to have something that looks like WHOOP + Gemini + Google Workspace all together. Every AI at your fingertips. Don’t forget Google Home, Google Maps, and sub-brands of Chrome, Waymo, Calico, and whatever else might be about to get churned out of their Moonshot Factory.

That’s not a competitor to WHOOP and Oura’s pricing model. It’s an attempt to build a horizontal AI health platform that sits above all of them. The $99 wristband is the on-ramp. The platform is the product. Whether Google succeeds at that is a separate question, but it’s the right way to frame what they actually launched.

Luna is a different bet entirely. The Luna Band is $149, no subscription, no screen, voice-first. You don’t interface with an app at all, from my understanding. You talk to the band, and the AI engine behind it (Luna calls it LifeOS) talks back through your earbuds or phone, or pulses your wrist haptically. Research-grade optical sensor array plus a six-axis IMU. Interestingly, Bose is a strategic investor.[11]

A year ago, a screen-free wrist was considered a constraint for WHOOP and other screenless wearables. With Luna’s voice-first framing landing this week, the lack of a screen on the wrist has flipped to being an advantage. I love this. It’s a clear signal that the wearable category isn’t done evolving.

The screen-fatigue and subscription-fatigue observations Rinser and Duijnstee are making are real consumer trends. Whether Luna is the company that wins the consumer wellness layer on that bet is a separate question. The bet itself is credible and well-timed.

The subscription model isn’t dying, and the game isn’t fundamentally changing, despite what the headlines have been saying for the past two weeks. Even Google’s “no subscription” framing on the Fitbit Air is misleading. What they’ve actually done is shift to an in-app purchase model that mimics what already happens on the phone, with the Google Health Coach sitting behind its own paywall at roughly the same price point as Oura’s membership. Across the category, every one of these companies is making money on some combination of hardware, subscription, in-app purchases, data, and partnerships that monetize the connections they’ve built. The mix varies by player.

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If we’re trying to figure out where this category is actually heading, or who eventually wins the wearables game, the pricing model is one of the less interesting things to track. There are several other dynamics worth paying attention to instead.

Well first of all, this isn’t about who has the coolest wristband. Yes, there’s a bit more competition between WHOOP, Luna, and Google due to the similar form factor, but honestly that’s not the value of the product or the company. It’s the interface, the algorithm, data quality (if it proves out), and the sheer volume of customers they already have loyal to their platform.

The bands are converging. Luna looks almost identical to WHOOP. Same screenless puck on a strap. Which raises an obvious question: how much IP protection does WHOOP actually have on the physical band design? I’d guess less than people assume. The physical product just isn’t where the differentiation lives anymore. Anyone with reasonable hardware engineering can ship a credible screenless puck on a strap.

WHOOP has 2.5M paying members. Oura has 5.5M+ rings in market. According to Oura’s own data, members spend 23.5 hours a day wearing the ring and open the app 3.2 times per day.[12] That is real lock-in, and you don’t unwind that with a $99 wristband and a launch week of headlines. People who have already adopted these platforms aren’t switching easily, especially the ones using the data to make actual training or health decisions.

I’ve been making this argument for a while. WHOOP says it has the data on accuracy and validation, but it hasn’t been sharing it with us. So how do we actually know how accurate it is? The Marques Brownlee review of the Fitbit Air earlier this month gave us a useful data point. Brownlee, a consumer tech reviewer whose channel reaches roughly 20 million subscribers, wore all three (Apple Watch, WHOOP 5.0, Fitbit Air) through workouts and recoveries. On a HIIT tempo run, his calorie count showed nearly a 45% difference between WHOOP and the other two devices.[13] For a consumer making fitness decisions, that might be tolerable. For a company trying to credibly move into reimbursed care, validation transparency becomes a real issue. I made a related argument in my piece on Tom Hale’s WSJ op-ed earlier this year:

I’ll recap that major takeaway: I believe we need an industry-led standard that ranks wearables on the quality of their sensor data and the sensitivity and specificity of their algorithms, with a transparent grade (think A through D) so consumers and partners can actually compare.[14] The dynamic we’re watching now, where multiple credible products converge on the same form factor and consumers can’t tell which one is more accurate, makes that argument ever more apropos.

This is what Luna brought to the table. Voice-first versus screen-based versus app-based. Luna is the bet that voice plus haptics replaces the app interface entirely. WHOOP and Fitbit Air still assume you’re going to open an app on your phone. Apple Watch is the watch-face camp. Each of these is a different theory of how the user actually interacts with their health data day to day, and we haven’t settled which one wins.

I think the really interesting part of these new announcements is that I think a lot of people were starting to think that new entrants couldn’t make a splash in a market that was starting to solidify around WHOOP vs Oura. People had sort of written off Fitbit.

A couple of months ago we were discussing the ecosystems that WHOOP and Oura were building and their $10B+ valuations based on that,[15] and now we have to step back and acknowledge that those are just babies compared to the Google and Apples of the world.

What Google is doing with the Fitbit Air, and what Apple will eventually do with whatever they ship next, isn’t building an ecosystem around the wearable. They already have ecosystems. They’re adding the wearable as one more node. Whatever Google ships next plugs into Gemini, Workspace, Maps, Home, Chrome, and the broader AI platform play. Whatever Apple ships next plugs into HealthKit, the Watch, the iPhone, AirPods, and an installed base measured in billions. The wearable becomes one node in a daily-use AI graph the user is already inside.

Finally, remember when everyone was talking about the Internet of Things about a decade ago? That phrase hasn’t been showing up in the lexicon much lately, but I think it’s about to come back into the conversation because there are plenty of companies, some of which I’ve been talking to, working on ditching wearables all together. Will it be implanted biohacking devices with BLE? Or are we looking at ambient data collection where you don’t have to wear anything at all and the data collection just happens around you. Who knows what will end up being the winning paradigm in a decade?

My take: we are not anywhere near commoditization. We are watching an evolution play out across product capabilities, pricing models, form factors, and larger ecosystem plays, with several different theories of what comes next.

Google is using cheap hardware to feed a platform play that’s bundled into its AI subscriptions. Luna is betting that voice-first, screen-free, and no-subscription is closer to where the consumer interface is heading. WHOOP is using its premium subscription to fund a move into reimbursed clinical care.[16] Oura is using ring hardware revenue, patent licensing, and a series of acquisitions to build toward clinical and diagnostic capabilities.[12] Apple has the infrastructure to do whatever it decides to do next, and the patience to wait. I’m sure Samsung and Garmin are also working on where they will fit into the competitive landscape as well.

None of these are the same bet. None of them are commoditization plays. And luckily for these companies, we as consumers love trying new stuff. There are very few people sitting on the sidelines waiting to see where this all ends up in ten years. The demand is going to keep funding the experiment, and there are going to be multiple evolutions of this category before anything settles.

Blythe Karow is a strategic management consultant and founder of The Karow Advisory Group. She writes The Device Files, a Substack publication on MedTech strategy, market access, and commercialization.

Footnotes

1. DC Rainmaker, “Whoop On The Defensive: Hastily Worded Plan of Future Features,” May 2026. https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2026/05/whoops-defensive-hastily-features.html

2. Lifehacker, “The Fitbit Air Is Real, and It May Actually Be a Whoop Killer,” May 2026.

3. The Upside, “Upside Analysis: Google’s Fitbit Air and Google Health Coach, Why They Could be a Game Changer.”

1. Memeburn, “New Luna Band: The $149 Tracker Taking on Google’s Fitbit Air,” May 2026. https://memeburn.com/new-luna-band-the-149-tracker-taking-on-googles-fitbit-air/

2. Leonard Rinser, LinkedIn post, May 2026.

3. Bas Duijnstee, LinkedIn post, May 2026.

4. Google blog, “Introducing the new Google Fitbit Air,” May 7, 2026. https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/devices/fitbit/fitbit-air/

5. Android Central, “Google’s Fitbit Air is finally here, and it’s the screenless fitness band we’ve been waiting for,” May 2026. https://www.androidcentral.com/wearables/fitbit/google-fitbit-air-launch-specs-price

6. Men’s Journal, “Google Launches $100 ‘Screen-Free’ Fitbit Air: What to Know,” May 8, 2026.

7. The 5K Runner, “Fitbit Air Review: $99 Whoop Alternative Buyer’s Guide,” May 7, 2026. https://the5krunner.com/2026/05/07/fitbit-air-opinion-review-buyers-guide/

8. audioXpress, “Luna Unveils Luna Band and Voice-Led LifeOS Engine for Wearables at CES 2026,” January 2026. https://audioxpress.com/news/luna-unveils-luna-band-and-voice-led-lifeos-engine-for-wearables-at-ces-2026

9. Blythe Karow, “The Clinical Wearables Revolution Is Here, and Oura’s $900M Raise Shows Where It’s Heading,” The Device Files, November 2025. https://blythekarow.substack.com/p/the-clinical-wearables-revolution

10. Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), “Fitbit Air: The Truth about the ‘Whoop killer,’” YouTube, May 2026.

11. Blythe Karow, “Revisiting Tom Hale’s December WSJ Op-Ed: Do We Still Need to Talk About a Third FDA Pathway?” The Device Files, February 4, 2026. https://blythekarow.substack.com/p/revisiting-tom-hales-december-wsj

12. Blythe Karow, “The Wearables Breakdown, Part 4: The Next Episode: Where the Real Opportunities Lie in the Future of Wearables,” The Device Files, 2025.

13. Blythe Karow, “The New CMS ACCESS Program is Extending its Application Deadline through May 15. Should You Apply? WHOOP Just Did.” The Device Files, April 2026. https://blythekarow.substack.com/p/the-new-cms-access-program-is-extending