3 features a screenless Apple fitness tracker needs to rival Fitbit and Garmin

• September 26, 2026

Apple has reportedly taken notice of the popularity of the likes of the Google Fitbit Air and Garmin Cirqa — screenless fitness trackers designed for background activity tracking without smartwatch-style screens or notifications, originally associated with Whoop.

Like the best smart rings, these passive ‘set and forget’ trackers work in the background to collect fitness and recovery information, which is then pumped into your AI-powered health app of choice to inform future habits.

According to a Bloomberg report and a separate post on MacRumors, Apple has been working on prototypes ‘for months’, but isn’t quite sold on whether to move forward. Apple’s senior vice president of services Eddy Cue is mentioned in the reports ‘to be pushing for wearables with simpler interfaces, like the screen-free Whoop and Oura Ring’.

Not only do I think it’s a good idea — I reviewed a whole bunch of screenless trackers this year, and rated the Cirqa as my favorite in TR’s official Garmin Cirqa review — but I also think Apple’s been laying the groundwork for a device like this. Here are the features I think an ‘Apple Whoop’ needs to be competitive — and they’ve all been introduced to the best Apple watches within the last few years.

1. An Action Button

All screenless fitness trackers offer very few ways for the wearer to actually interact with the hardware. The Whoop uses a haptic sensor on the top of its puck, which you have to tap to stop an alarm or put the device into Bluetooth pairing mode. Unfortunately, every time I’ve tested the Whoop, I end up repeatedly tapping the top of the device like a nodding bird until the LEDs change color. But when you’re actually tracking workouts on most screenless devices, you either start the workout manually in the accompanying app, or just go, and hope the device’s automatic activity detection picks it up.

The Garmin Cirqa’s tactile button, in combination with its haptics, is much more useful. Press it once, and the device vibrates to signify a workout has started. Press it again, and it vibrates to confirm that the workout has ended. It’s that simple. No pausing workouts, as it would defeat the point of capturing a whole holistic representation of what your body’s doing during activity and recovery.

Apple has the perfect mechanism for this: the Action button, first introduced on the Apple Watch Ultra in 2022, and since ported over to the iPhone. A screenless Apple fitness tracker could include that little orange button as a straightforward way to stop vibrations or sounds of an alarm, or start and stop workouts like the Garmin Cirqa.

2. A longer battery life than other Apple Watches

Apple has recently taken steps to address perhaps the biggest criticism of Apple Watches: battery life. For a long time, Apple Watches were stuck at 18 hours, until last year’s upgrade in battery and efficiency bumped them up to 24 hours. As of 2026, the Apple Watch Ultra 4 now clocks in at 48 hours between charges.

This is for a full-power Apple Watch with GPS workouts, a 3,000-nit brightness liquid retina display, and communications features out the wazoo. I imagine a screenless fitness tracker, which just has the Health Sensing System and related sensors like the gyroscope to run, would last considerably longer — perhaps five days between charges, ideal for a set-and-forget tracker designed to be worn constantly, including overnight.

3. The latest Readiness Score and Vitals improvements

Speaking of which, Apple’s already laid the groundwork for advanced recovery tracking with its new Readiness score and improved Vitals apps. Apple’s latest Health Sensing System, with a larger surface area for improved skin contact and redesigned electrodes, allows its watches to track overnight heart rate variability much more accurately, and more often, than previous generations — 24 times more often, to be exact.

This allows Apple Watches to deliver an accurate Readiness score, showing on a scale of 1-10 how recovered you are and whether you’re ready to expend energy, as well as overhauling the Vitals app. Recovery and overnight health are key components of screenless fitness trackers, as they’re designed (as mentioned above) for constant wear, ticking away in the background to monitor expenditure and recovery without other distractions.

A screenless fitness tracker interfacing with Apple Health is crying out for Apple’s new Health Sensing System and its accompanying overnight Readiness and recovery features. With it, the Apple fitness band might be able to beat the likes of Whoop, Google and Garmin (all of whom have used Readiness scores for years) at their own game.

Which screenless fitness tracker is the best? Vote in our poll below:

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Apple has reportedly taken notice of the popularity of the likes of the Google Fitbit Air and Garmin Cirqa — screenless fitness trackers designed for background activity tracking without smartwatch-style screens or notifications, originally associated with Whoop. Like the best smart rings, these passive ‘set and forget’ trackers work in…