What do you get when you buy Google’s flagshipPixel Watch 2wearable? On the hardware side, you get a vastly improved watch over the Pixel Watch, which offers many new features, including new health sensors and an updated charging mechanism. It’s one of the best Android-powered wearables, but hardware is only half the battle.
The Pixel Watch 2 connects to theFitbitapp on your phone and comes with six months of Fitbit Premium, offering deeper insights that Google otherwise wants you to pay $9.99 per month for. A premium subscription isn’t new, but Google takes an interesting approach to Fitbit Premium that leaves you footing the bill (eventually) for information and insights that others offer for free.
Here’s why I think Fitbit Premium offers questionable value compared to the competition — and how Google could improve it with just a few small tweaks.
Fitbit Premium
Fitbit Premium brings a range of features behind a $10-per-month paywall, including sleep tracking and reports and guided meditations, workouts, and nutritional information to help you further your health journey. Yet, it doesn’t offer enough value for money for me, and some of its paid features are available for free with smartwatches from Samsung. If you buy a Google smartwatch, you only get six months of Fitbit Premium for free, after which the $10/m fee feels too high for the value you derive.
Price and availability
Cheaper on an annual plan
Fitbit Premium is available on iOS and Android. You can use the app with just your phone, but certain features are limited unless you use a Fitbit device (which work with iPhone or Android) or a either generation of Pixel Watch (which only work with Android phones).
Fitbit Premium availability is dependent upon language rather than by country. Right now, it’s available in the following languages:
Chinese (Traditional and Simplified)
Indonesian
The Fitbit app
Customizable and feature-rich
The Fitbit app follows all of Google’s Material Design guidelines, which provides continuity with the rest of the Pixel experience but limits how much information you may see at a glance. Accessing the same information takes more scrolling than Apple Health and Samsung Health.
The app has a series of preset focuses, each highlighting different information. If you want to be more active, sleep better, manage your weight or stress, or improve your heart health, these presets do a good job of grouping different datasets based on your specific goals. I recommend you create a custom preset to specify exactly what you want to see and where it should be on the page.
For this review, we’ve used the Fitbit app on theGoogle Pixel 8 Propaired with thePixel Watch 2. The experience would be mostly the same with a recent Fitbit like the latestFitbit Charge 6. Depending on which Fitbit (or Pixel Watch) you have, the amount of data you can access will vary, but the Fitbit App is feature-rich, although the design means you have to navigate to more screens than you should have to.
Fitbit Charge 6 review: Do you really need a smartwatch?
Quality fitness tracking, more Google than ever
A point to note about the Fitbit app, however, is that Google is in the middle of transitioning once-independent Fitbit accounts to Google ones. you may only use Fitbit on personal Google accounts — not Google Workspace ones. It’s a confusing mess and a known issue that Google is unwilling to fix.
Fitbit Premium features
What are you paying for, really?
What is the difference between the free version of Fitbit and Fitbit Premium? Whereas the former gives you access to most of your data, Google has chosen to put personalized guidance behind the Fitbit Premium paywall.
Do you need Fitbit Premium to use the Google Pixel Watch 2?
Fitbit’s built in, but Premium is optional
This represents Google’s approach to health: general guidance for everybody, but anything personalized is paid for. Its biggest problem, however, is that some of these features haven’t worked for me, and it’s challenging to discern just how much value Fitbit Premium offers.
The key offerings of Fitbit Premium include stress, readiness and sleep insights, general health and wellbeing trends, and an entire suite of content focused on coaching you through your health journey. The Fitbit app recently received a fairly major update designed to simplify the experience, resulting in a deluge of content to sift through in the Coach tab.
Coaching and insights
The latest update to the Fitbit app has highlighted that non-personalized guidance and coaching is the future of Fitbit Premium. It is unique compared to the competition and offers a lot of content that could be useful to many users.
Examples of the content available in the Coach tab include:
The Coach tab is designed to be your one-stop shop and help you through your journey, but surfacing the right content is overly complex. There are a lot of tabs, swiping, and filtering to find the right workout, and you have to be dedicated to finding the right content for you.
Coaching has a lot of potential in its current form, but it has a substantial discovery problem. There’s a particular irony in that, given the tab used to be called Discover and was far easier to use.
Sleep scores and tracking
Whereas coaching is unique to Fitbit Premium, every smartwatch platform and maker offers some form of sleep, readiness, and stress management. This is free for many of them – such as theGalaxy Watch 6, the top competitor to the Pixel Watch 2 – and this is a problem for Fitbit and Google.
The Pixel Watch 2 offers excellent hardware and occupies most of Google’s wearable marketing, yet it is not well-integrated with Fitbit. To many customers, the Fitbit app will just be the general health app in their heads, and a bad integration with Google’s hardware will result in ill will toward Fitbit.
The Fitbit app gives you an overall score for your sleep based on time spent in each stage, how long you spent asleep, and how your body has recovered, and Premium adds a “sleep animal” on top of that — a cute illustration of your sleep habits. You can dig into each of these, and the tracking provided by the Pixel Watch 2’s advanced sensors is a boon when digging into this further.
Stress management
I’ve found Fitbit Premium’s stress management features to be average at best. Most of the time, for me, the app doesn’t pick up data from the Pixel Watch 2; right now, it cannot sync the past four weeks of data from my Pixel Watch 2. Even when data does sync properly, insights for Fitbit Premium users are limited to just three categories with very little context:
Considering this is billed as one of the hero features of the Pixel Watch 2, it feels like Google has done the bare minimum versus providing true value to the end user.
Readiness Score
Your readiness score is also key to the promised Fitbit Premium offering. Designed to give you guidance on whether you should go for that extended run today, it quantifies how your body is feeling and helps you make more informed decisions.
Google does a fairly good job of its approach to Daily Readiness. It considers the three main factors: activity, recent sleep, and heart rate variability. All three are universally accepted as key to your overall readiness, and Google gives you a lot of data.
When it successfully tracks your readiness, you are presented with an overall score and a breakdown of the score for each category. You can also dig deeper into each sub-category, and tapping on one of the tiles takes you to a page with trend reports related to that item.
Should you subscribe?
An iffy value proposition
Fitbit Premium feels like many other Google products: it’s a great idea lost during implementation. There are clear signs that Fitbit Premium will focus on coaching going forward, which makes sense, but Google also charges for things that should arguably be free.
Sleep, stress, and readiness were all key parts of the Pixel Watch 2 launch, yet you must ultimately pay for them after your six-month free trial — there are sleep and stress features exclusive to Premium, and you won’t get a Daily Readiness Score at all on Fitbit’s free tier. Once you’ve swallowed the pill of having to pay for Premium, you’ll realize that many of these features are not good enough to pay for.
I’m most concerned about the future of Fitbit within Google. The app’s design means integral features such as ECG reports are nearly impossible to find (as Fitbit’s community notes). The lack of care for the core health features means relying on any of Google’s wearable ecosystem feels far too risky.
There are many ways this can be improved. First, Google needs to stop charging for features that should be free. Second, Google must ensure it strikes the right balance between its revenue and health goals – too much focus on the bottom line will render revenue goals useless, as Fitbit Premium will not offer enough value in an already-crowded space.
Looking forward, my most pressing concern is when and how Google will handle a feature I’m personally invested in: medical records in the Fitbit app. Will it lock some of these features behind the Fitbit Premium paywall? My concerns around this and the general direction of Fitbit Premium mean that it’s hard to recommend paying for. While it has some positives, Fitbit Premium currently offers dubious value at a questionable price. When my six-month free trial ends in April, I will be canceling my Fitbit Premium subscription.
Best Fitbit in 2025
There’s a Fitbit for every lifestyle
Nirave is a creator, evangelist and founder of House of Tech, which is focused on the intersection of health and technology. Following a heart attack at the age of 33, he’s been focused on how we can use data to improve our health and ultimately live a long and more fruitful life. Follow him onInstagram,Threads, andYouTubefor live updates on his Sleep and Health journeys. He can also be found atHoT.tech.
