Two Weeks with the Fitbit Air

Back in mid-September, I wrote about reconsidering my Apple Watch use, in large part because I don’t like the promised upcoming “Audio Intelligence” features. And, I thought, it could be good to have one less always-on computer screen with me. Right?

Well, I went ahead and ordered that Fitbit Air, and I’ve been wearing it instead of—not in tandem with—the Apple Watch for the last two weeks. (Actually, getting closer to three now.)

The good

It’s light and I don’t have to charge it often. They say once a week; I’ve been charging about twice a week, I think, because I’m a little neurotic about letting any device get down much below 40% charge. The software that I’m using—Google Health because I have to, Bevel because I wanted to give it a try after reading a couple of positive reviews—is refreshingly non-gamified compared to Apple Fitness. No rings, no monthly challenges. Google Health is pretty straightforward, and Bevel uses a unique rubric of “strain vs. recovery” to give you ideas on how much you should exercise on a given day. No minutes, no “move points” that theoretically-but-not-really correspond to calories. I also appreciate that both Bevel and Google Health know specific training exercises—for instance, “Arnold Press with dumbbells”—and both have little video/animation showing you how to do the exercise correctly. Instead of simply saying “core training”, you can build a workout routine of multiple exercises and save it.

And, yes, it does let me use other watches, or no watch at all. I only have one other watch, and just to add some irony to the story, that watch’s band broke on Friday. But, hey. It’s a nice watch, much nicer than the Apple Watch in fashion terms, and I’m still considering some other radically different watch as a second. The Apple Watch has never been adventurous in terms of its watch face options, particularly in the “you can have any face you want as long as it’s San Francisco” typography choices.

As far as I can tell, the Fitbit has a more reliable heart rate sensor. It also seems to be better when it comes to sleep tracking. I’m not saying that only because it’s seemingly more likely to tell me that I slept well while Apple Watch and Sleep++ tell me my sleep was crap; I’m saying it because what it tells me seems much more in line with the way I actually feel when I get up in the morning.

The bad

The truth is that I miss a lot—I mean, a lot—of features that I didn’t expect to with the Apple Watch. The biggest one is Apple Pay: I used that on the Watch whenever I could, and it’s a hard habit to break.

It turns out, though, it’s not just Apple Pay. It’s controlling Castro, my podcast playing app, when I’m using the Bluetooth speaker and the phone is in another room. Or looking at the watch for walking directions after I start the map app on my phone. Or seeing what music’s playing when I’m streaming dinner jazz in the evening. Or glancing at the watch to see what the UV index is. Or checking what my current heart rate is. And, while the gamified aspects to Apple Fitness kind of annoy me, the truth is that they also kind of work. Keeping up with my exercise, or even just a general “stay moving to stay fit” vibe, requires just a little more awareness, more conscious effort, that it did before. There are places in my life I’m specifically trying to introduce a need to have more conscious awareness—driving places without the GPS constantly on, for instance. I’m not sure this is a place where that’s good, though.

It’s also simply using the watch without having the phone in my pocket at all. I had a model with GPS, so I could go for a walk and still get the route recorded without bringing the phone with me. Now, not only does that not work, I don’t even reliably get credits for steps in Pedometer++ without carrying the phone. This should work, as far as I can tell; the Fitbit syncs with Google Health, which in turn syncs with Apple Health, which should sync with Pedometer++, right?

Yeah, well. This leads to

The ugly

I’ve triple-checked everything to make sure every app says that it’s set up correctly, that Google Health is a data source for Apple Health and everything has the access that it needs. Doesn’t matter.

I’m sure some of this has to do with Apple making third-party integrations difficult. But that’s not sufficient to explain how out of sync these apps get. The fact that Google Health, Apple Health, and Pedometer++ will show step counts that are literally thousands of steps apart is baffling. I trust Google Health here only because the step counts it shows are close to what I was getting using the Apple Watch, and I doubt I’m walking materially less (or more) now.

I can start a workout in either Google Health or Bevel, and in theory they’ll sync with one another. In practice, I can’t figure out how to start a workout in Bevel that isn’t a “routine” but is just a single workout like indoor cycling. I can only log it after the fact. I can start it in Google Health, but unlike the Apple Watch, it doesn’t present exercises in a smart sort order (e.g., most often used at the top); you can only do that if you save a workout routine in it. If you start a workout in Bevel, after you’re finished, it’s stupidly easy to delete it rather than save it with no chance of recovery. This includes “the application appears to have frozen for three minutes on a screen that looks like it’s just going to give you a review of your completed workout, but if you click the ‘X’ to close it, you’ll discard everything, ha ha.”

So, I use Google Health for workouts. Does it have Live Activities yet, a feature Apple introduced four years ago? Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. Bevel does, but it’s not particularly good, and also see the last paragraph.

Again, yes, I’ll grant Apple makes integrating non-Apple hardware into their ecosystem more difficult than it needs to be. But that’s not the source of the problems I’m talking about here. Google Health has a cluttered, hard-to-follow user interface that occasionally suffers from weird language choices. (It took me over a week to discover that it called an exercise bike workout not “exercise bike” or “indoor cycle” or anything else with the word “cycle” or “bike’, but instead “spinning”.) Bevel’s is better in most respects, but its workout system is clunkier and, at least in my experience, buggy.

The verdict

I mean, I’m keeping it, and I’m getting used to not having that screen on my wrist. But it doesn’t mean I don’t miss it.

And, if Apple ever does make a screenless fitness tracker of their own (without creepy AI features), I’m switching back in a heartbeat.