New Fitbits probably won’t have Wear OS

The new Fitbit wearables yet to be announced probably won’t have Wear OS as their operating system. That was expected given the acquisition of Fitbit by Google, but a study of the code of the Fitbit app shows that Wear OS 3 is not there.

Fitbit

9to5Google did find three new Fitbit wearables, but none of them seem to run on the Google wearable operating system. The code names of the new Fitbits are Hera, Rhea and Nyota. Hera and Rhea have screen resolutions of 336 x 336 pixels and are therefore square as we have seen with Sense and Versa 3 from Fitbit, but Nyoto at 124 x 208 pixels has more of a screen like Fitbit Luxe. It does not have to mean that they are also completely new Fitbit models. They can also be successors of the aforementioned Fitbits.

9to5Google spotted a software bridge to connect smartwatches to smartphones via Bluetooth and that would mean that it is not about Wear OS, because such a bridge is not necessary at all. Wear OS ‘talks’ to smartphones in a completely different way. A disappointment, because the plan was to make Fitbit devices with Wear OS as the operating system. So if you would like to hang a Wear OS 3 gadget around your arm, you have only one option so far: Samsung Galaxy Watch 4.

Samsung Galaxy Watch 4

We have previously subjected Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 to a review. Our conclusion? “I have enjoyed wearing the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 Classic. It is a watch that is fast and accurate in terms of operation and has a better battery life than the Waer OS watches of recent years. Now that Samsung has got rid of its own Tizen, you also have access to the many apps in the Play Store, much more than Tizen offers. However, that switch still comes with a flaw, apps must be updated so that they work with the new Wear OS 3 on which the Galaxy Watch 4 runs. That will take time and as a result, for example, the range of watch faces for the Watch 4 is still small, and the Google Assistant also does not work yet. App developers can also use a tool for this that can easily make their apps suitable for the new Wear OS.”

At the same time, it would be nice if Fitbits started running on a different platform, because at the moment to sync your Fitbit data with Google Fit you have to turn to separate apps in order to transfer the data properly. Not exactly ideal, but some other apps require that data, such as sports apps and diet apps. That synchronization problem has probably been solved when Fitbit runs on Wear OS, but that apparently remains to be seen.