Google confirms the Pixel Watch won’t have Fitbit’s automatic workout tracking [U]

The Pixel Watch is the first-ever Wear OS smartwatch with Fitbit integration after Google’s billion-dollar acquisition of the company, but it has a few missing features. The Pixel Watch doesn’t support automatic workout tracking and some other Fitbit features.

To update: Google has confirmed that the Pixel Watch will not have automatic workout detection. See below for more.

As first pointed out by our colleagues at ConnectTheWatts Yesterday, a comparison of the Pixel Watch’s fitness features to the latest Fitbit smartwatches revealed some missing features.

The biggest missing feature is support for automatic workout detection on the Pixel Watch, a key feature of Fitbit devices. Automatic exercise detection uses 24/7 heart rate monitoring and other sensors on your Fitbit to recognize when your activity qualifies as an exercise and starts a session based on that data. These automatically recognized workouts also count towards your daily/weekly exercise goals in the Fitbit app.

However, the Pixel Watch completely lacks support for automatic exercise detection, as a comparison of smartwatches in the Google Store confirms. Also, the Pixel Watch lacks support for tracking swim strokes.

It’s worth noting, however, that the Pixel Watch is listed with auto-tracking on the Fitbit website and in the watch’s dedicated store listing. We turned to Google to clarify this difference.

Update 11.10.: Google has clarified this 9to5Google that the Pixel Watch Not supports automatic tracking of workouts and exercises, as is the case with some Fitbit models. Some forms of exercise such as B. a “brisk walk” can be recognized by the Fitbit app after You have completed the activity.

Apparently, fully automatic workout detection can arrive on the Pixel Watch in time, but it’s not there at launch.

A Fitbit spokesperson explains:

The Google Pixel Watch doesn’t currently have the ability to automatically start, stop, and pause a workout on the device like users can on Fitbit devices. However, it automatically recognizes a workout after you’ve completed it and logs the summary with your stats in your Fitbit app. This is great for when you forget about impromptu exercise, or when you don’t even realize you’re exercising – e.g. B. a brisk walk to the store. Over time we will work to add more device workout detection to our watch portfolio.

Elsewhere on the page, it’s confirmed that the Pixel Watch also doesn’t support irregular heart rhythm notifications, a feature available in a huge list of Fitbit products that notifies the wearer of signs of atrial fibrillation. High/low heart rate notifications aren’t available either, although Google focuses on the accuracy of the Pixel Watch’s heart rate sensor.

Some other missing features from Fitbit’s software suite include stress alerts and EDA sensors, guided breathing, “SmartWake” alerts, SpO2 tracking, and support for Fitbit’s new sleep profile feature.

9to5Google’s take

As our sister site ConnectTheWatts pointed out that these are potentially big problems, maybe even deal-breakers, on the Pixel Watch’s fitness/health tracking side. While the dedicated experience that Fitbit’s products offer will certainly always have a handful of benefits, the Pixel Watch’s health experience feels pretty compromised, even compared to other Wear OS smartwatches like the Galaxy Watch 5.

Hopefully some of these missing fitness features can appear in future updates. It seems reasonable that automatic exercise detection, irregular heart rhythm notifications, sleep profile and other features that use the Pixel Watch’s existing sensors could be added via software.

But still this is hard to see. Health and fitness tracking has always been by far Wear OS’s biggest pain point as a platform, and the Fitbit integration should finally fix that. As it turns out, there’s still a long way to go.

Will these omissions hurt the smartwatch side of the Pixel Watch experience? We have to wait.

The Pixel Watch is available to pre-order now from the Google Store, as well as other retailers such as Best Buy.

More on Pixel Watch:

*Added note that Google mentions auto-tracking support elsewhere. We check the differences with Google.

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