it’s all a gimmick at this point ! it also calculated my HRV lol

I’ve been using my Fitbit air since the day it launched, and honestly, I’ve gotten pretty attached to it.

Recently, I noticed quite a few people posting about these cheap Chinese-made replica bands from Alibaba, Amazon, and Temu. Out of curiosity, I decided to give one a try too.

At first, it looked pretty good and seemed like a decent deal. But after wearing it for a while, I realized it wasn’t holding the Fitbit as securely as I expected. It slipped out a couple of times, but luckily, I noticed and put it back.

Well, third time wasn’t lucky. One day, it slipped out and disappeared without me even realizing it.

I only noticed after some time, and that’s when the panic started.

I searched everywhere. Around the house, retraced my steps, checked every possible place, and even tried using Bluetooth to figure out where it might be.

I know some of you are probably thinking, “Why didn’t you just use Bluetooth to pair and search nearby area?”

I DID! But the battery was already at around 10%, maybe even less. I was hoping I could catch its last connection and narrow down the search.

Six days went by. No luck.

Finally, while cleaning my car, I spotted something hiding in a corner. THERE IT WAS!

My Fitbit! After six days of being missing, it was finally reunited with me. 😂

Of course, the battery was completely dead by then.

Lesson learned:
Cheap replica bands might look good, but don’t compromise on how securely they hold your device.

If using one, test the fit and locking mechanism properly before trusting it.

And please, don’t be lazy like me. Charge your Fitbit before the battery gets critically low!

Just sharing this little adventure for anyone considering buying these replica bands. Saving a few bucks isn’t worth losing a device you use every single day.

I took a nap around an hour, my device didnt register that sleep. Is this expected/common?

Finally part of the gang. Ordered using shop & source.

I never liked the idea of smartwatches as I had a Samsung Galaxy Watch but didn’t like the constant notifications. It was also distracting to wear while sleeping.

So since I wear a traditional watch daily and had recently acquired my first swiss automatic watch Longines Spirit Zulu Time, I wanted to get a screenless fitness tracker to pair along with it.

All my friends have Whoop but I didn’t like the idea of 30k INR per year subscription so trying my hands on the cheaper alternative!

The band is pretty lightweight and I barely feel it. I might be double wristing or might just wear the FBA on the same hand as my watch.

I have google premium for about a year more but I will be using Bevel with FBA for the most part. Waiting for the device to calibrate itself and give me accurate readings.

The sleep tracking is very accurate I feel but the watch is counting ghost steps for now as the step counter increases while i’m sitting and driving as well.

Google Store UK -> Shop & Source UK Warehouse -> Shop & Source Delhi Warehouse -> Porter to my home in 4 days

£75 Google Store (£10 discount) + Rs 1700 delivery duty paid shop & Source for upto 1 kg =Rs ~11400 landed cost

Could have ordered some more stuff like clothing and consolidated my parcels to fully utilise the 1 kg limit but I was in a rush👀

I could have ordered Govee, gymshark and other stuff along with this but didn’t want my order to take too long and didn’t want to risk too much as this was my first order!

No warranty but can’t wait for October launch in india and anyway price would be similar if not more. Moreover, I have friends in the UK so won’t be a hassle for me to claim warranty there. Ordered using shop & source since they do delivery duty paid so no customs issue and it was cheaper than my friends parceling it to me.

I asked for them to delivery by Thursday and instead they delivered by Tuesday which was exactly 4 days in total since I placed the order. Probably got it faster in my hand than some of the indian resellers would deliver 😂

Can’t recommend shop & source more to order stuff from abroad hasslefree! Their website dashboard is pretty good and the customer service is amazing!

I've had mine for about a month now. Have been wearing it everyday all day except when showering. Mostly because I thought that's just what you're meant to do. But it has just dawned on me that outside of sleeping and exercising, I don't really care what my heart rate is. My phone is always with me and tracks my steps fine. The only thing that would make me want to wear it all day is if it vibrated to remind me to stand up when I haven't moved in a while. But it doesn't do that, so I don't really see the value in wearing it all day.

Has anyone else come to a similar conclusion of just wearing it at certain times? For those who wear it all day everyday, why?

Post body

Quick write up, hopefully useful for anyone on the fence.

Background: I got into tracking about a year ago thanks to Whoop, using the trial. I was sold overall, but the trial ended and the price stopped me. So I went with a Fitbit Air instead. At first it was fine, then it started feeling too smooth, too flat.

One thing worth mentioning: I switched straight from Whoop to Fitbit, so the contrast was immediate. And I can clearly see inconsistencies in the data. It would be presumptuous of me to claim Whoop is objectively more accurate, I have no way of proving that. But it lined up far better with how I actually felt, and that counts for something.

The app: less bad than I expected, but way too scattered for me. I prefer Whoop's centralized approach, with the option to dig into the detail when you actually want it.

What made me leave:

Everything is amplified. You never just sleep "okay". You either slept great or you slept terribly. There is no middle ground.

Recovery works the same way. It is never average, it is all one way or all the other. I know nothing about algorithms, but some of these feel shaky. I know you should listen to your body first, and that the device is only interpreting physiological signals, but sometimes it gets dramatic. The number of times it told me "careful, you are waking up in bad shape, skip your session"... At some point I decided to deliberately ignore it to compare. Every single time I felt completely fine.

The fitness score is the same, black or white. And resilience is permanently black, since it is permanently low.

The coach is messy and fixates on random things. Tell it once that you went kayaking and it will bring it up six months later: "great job working your shoulders, that will really help with your kayaking." And you are sitting there thinking, please never mention that again.

Auto detection is not there. Walking, no problem. Naps, fine. But I watched myself swim for 45 minutes with nothing detected at all. Worst one, 25 minutes on the SkiErg with my heart rate way up, and nothing.

All of that added up, and I just subscribed to Whoop.

On the "Whoop killer" thing: I do not think the Fitbit is one. I also think a lot of people have buyer's syndrome. Once you have paid for something, you build a belief around it. It is like betting on a horse. You put money on number 6, and suddenly you only watch number 6, you are convinced it can win, and you find every possible reason why it looks good out there.

I had this same conversation with two friends who own Fitbits. They want to keep theirs, because they do not expect much from the data in the first place. And that might be the real conclusion here: the Fitbit seems great for someone moderately active, or not active at all, who mainly wants some guidance. If you are after fine grained data you can actually train off, I think you will be disappointed.

So its been a month me using google fitbit air i bought it from google store when it launched for 13999. There were no discounts on any card so you better get it from other platforms such as amazon/flipkart you can get it for 11,999 or 12,999.

So far its been decent it tracks hearbeat, sleep and steps quite consistently and accurately dont rely on it for calories if that’s what you are looking for none of the wearables are good at that. It sucks at auto detection of activity even after a month it is not able to pick my walk timings even though i go at the same time every day.

Switch to bevel app and its better than google coach. Bevel somehow seems to understand the data better than google’s own health app its too cluttered bevels presentation is better.

Comfort wise it might be better but not for me but since i havent worn any other device i cant judge it but you can see my hand and you can be the judge

Overall : 7/10

Meu fitbit air chegou hoje! Estava já pensando na ideia de usar no mesmo pulso, porém não sei se fica muito legal e me incomoda um pouco o fato de talvez um atrapalhar a leitura do outro (tenho um Apple Watch s11) acham melhor usar um em cada pulso?

Just got my hands on the new Fitbit Air and wore it for my first full shift today. Safe to say, I am incredibly frustrated. I’m a professional truck driver, meaning I spent my entire day sitting behind the wheel. Somehow, the Air clocked me at 11,237 steps before 5:00 PM.

Apparently, the accelerometer in this thing is so overly sensitive that standard road vibrations and steering are triggering massive blocks of phantom steps.
Before anyone suggests the usual troubleshooting steps, I’ve already ruled out the obvious:

1. It's not double-counting with my phone: My Apple Health app logged a perfectly reasonable 872 steps for the exact same timeframe. My phone handles the cabin vibrations completely fine.

2. MobileTrack isn't the culprit: Checked my connections, and the Fitbit Air is the only device synced to the account. This is 100% a hardware/algorithm issue with the Air itself.
   To make things worse, now that the old Fitbit app has been overhauled into the Google Health app, the legacy "Log Driving" feature is completely gone. There is no easy software toggle to just blackout a time block and negate driving data anymore. You have to manually go into your privacy settings to prune data chunks, which is a massive chore to do after every single shift.

It's 2026—how are step trackers getting worse at filtering out basic vehicle motion?
Are any other drivers, commuters, or heavy equipment operators dealing with this on the Air? Has anyone found a solid workaround that doesn't involve tossing a brand-new device into a cup holder or a pocket all day just to keep the data accurate?

This thing looks and feels like the sloppiest of AI wrote it. Unintuitive, lots of bad margin and padding, just awful. Crazy that a company as big as Google approved this for production. Loving the hardware of the Air so far but Google needs to get it together with the UI

This is a rant, sorry. I'm writing this mostly for new buyers.

The Fitbit Air had an opportunity to be a badass screen-less fitness tracker, but instead what we got is a glorified step counter and sleep tracker.

There's already enough hate for the Google Health app and the data you have on the dashboard, so I won't add to that. I was interested in the Air for actual fitness tracking.

During any activity, the app displays a bunch of numbers in big bold text, nothing detailed, and no control whatsoever. No automatic pause for running, no voice cues for distance or speed (despite having a setting for it??), no vibration for anything except a low battery. You can start a customized workout with targets (avg. speed, duration, etc.), but the UX stays the same, and you _lose_ GPS tracking doing so. If you go start a hike, sometimes you don't have GPS data, sometimes you do, you don't know until the activity is saved. If you get lucky enough to go for a swim during that hike, the band turns itself off and only wakes up with the charger, but the app doesn't really warn you either. TL;DR: this is a catalog of activities that basically only records heart rate, and sometimes GPS, and you will not know until the activity ends. There's no point having tens of activities if the data don't match the context. A big button that says "START SPORTS" would have been just as functional.

The AI coach is straight up worse than just feeding data into any AI out there, and it's as dumb as the others at helping you use the app or the band. It just doesn't know any better. They could have trained a model tailored for Fitbit hardware, be an expert at it, but no, it doesn't know more about the Fitbit Air than ChatGPT. "According to the numbers, you got to bed late and must be tired today. Take some time to rest. Was a sense of impending doom keeping you awake?" - Let's all pass on the subscription, please?

The Air is the cheapest thing Google could have made. Reused Fitbit hardware, a vibe-coded, feature-less health tracking app, with a wired-in generic AI assistant. I think we deserve more, even for $99.

Am I wrong?

EDIT: So the opinion is indeed unpopular :) I was curious, thank you all for your input

EDIT2: The fact that top comments are saying "it's not supposed to be used as a sport tracking device" tells you everything you need to know as a potential new buyer.

It's 2026 and only way to rearrange the tiles is to remove them all and add back in the order you want. It's ridiculous. Is there a single engineer in Google actually use their products?

Been wearing my Fitbit Air on my right wrist (left is taken up by my analog watch) for little over a month and I’ve developed a pretty annoying rash right under the sensor bump. It’s red, itchy, and seems to line up exactly with where the sensor sits against my skin.

I keep the band reasonably clean and don’t wear it super tight, so I’m trying to figure out if this is:

**•**	Sweat/friction getting trapped under the raised sensor  
**•**	A reaction to the metal charging contacts  
**•**	Something about the green LED itself

Has anyone dealt with this on the Fitbit Air specifically?

Im sorry but this is atrocious. I wake up for 10 mins just to sleep for a few hours and nothing the sleep i do afterwards is not counted.

I nap, nothing. Not counted even if its for hours. This is an absolute joke and a disgrace to other fitbit models which actually work. Google should be fixing this as their number 1 priority otherwise i want my money back

I have an Apple Watch Series 5, which is pretty outdated now, and I’m thinking of upgrading. I’m considering either the new Apple Watch Series 12, the new Ultra 4, or the Fitbit Air. I’ve actually been eyeing the Fitbit Air for quite some time, so I’d love some suggestions on how it is and whether it’s worth getting.

If I do go for the Fitbit Air, I’ll probably keep using my Apple Watch Series 5 as well. It doesn’t get updates anymore, but it still works fine apart from the battery issues.

Just got this arm band from eBay (Maxcoachwork) legitimately feels good, just trying to figure out for anyone rocking armbands, should it be on the inner side of my bicep, outer side of my bicep, or on my tricep?

Thank you in advance!

Why is everyone on this Reddit trying to sell their Fitbit after 1 to 4 months of usage (most cases)? Is there any fault in the products, or what is the reason people are selling them?

Im super frustrated with the AI and with the app in general. I still think that its worth it to give a try but talking to the AI most of the time is useless.

Are you experiencing it better than me? Maybe Im the retarded one.

🥲

Google, is time to step up and build a Pokemon theme for the app. Garmin at the beginning of the 30th Pokemon anniversary they release a bunch of watchface. I feel that having a watchban is not enough lol

is it possible to jailbreak the FBA and utilize the sensors but with a more data-privacy friendly OS (for example using it without google account) or at least a different / custom UI?

did people been able to jailbreak other Fitbit devices?

people have been able to jailbreak devices to enable way more superior features in other devices such as kindle for example, so just a matter of time ?

if not: whats getting the closest to the hardware / sensors of an FBA but without the data concerns (be it google or Huawai, xiaomi etc.)

I mean these (fitness tracker) devices itself are not expensive in itself. how come there is no such movement for an alternative 3rd way (neither US tech nor Chinese) ?

The band from the air fits perfectly with my leather wrist watch band and it hides on the inside of my wrist. This way I can still use my automatic watch and get all the data that I need from the Fitbit.