Apple Is Quietly Building a Whoop Rival, and It Tells You Where Wearables Are Headed

Apple is working on a fitness tracker with no screen, something closer to a Whoop band than an Apple Watch. That is the takeaway from a Bloomberg report this week. The caveats matter: this is an early exploratory effort, Apple has not decided whether to release it, and if it does, it will not arrive before 2028.

The prototypes are deliberately plain, a thin fabric band with a sensor-equipped module and no display. An Apple Watch is a small computer on wrist that also does fitness. A Whoop is the opposite, a quiet sensor that logs your body all day and sends it to your phone. Apple calls this stage a "technology investigation," and it reportedly has backing from Tim Cook and services chief Eddy Cue, who took over the company's health efforts last October.

Apple Is Quietly Building a Whoop Rival, Here's Why

Photo Credit: Apple

Why is Apple, the biggest name in smartwatches, looking at doing less? Because a newer set of rivals is growing fast by stripping things away. Whoop is now valued at around 10 billion dollars and is weighing an IPO, Oura filed for one this month, and Google already sells the screenless Fitbit Air for 99 dollars. These devices skip notifications and apps and just hand you a recovery or readiness score each morning. Apple has clearly noticed, folding similar ideas into its latest Watch and revamped Health app, including a readiness metric and a biological age estimate.

The subscription trap is the real thing to watch

The part worth watching is the business model, not the hardware. Most of these trackers make their money on subscriptions. In India, a Whoop 5.0 band with a year of membership runs roughly Rs 26,000 to Rs 40,000, and you keep paying after that to see your own data. Oura sells the Ring 4 from Rs 28,900 plus about Rs 599 a month. Whoop even drew a backlash in 2025 for charging existing users to upgrade hardware it had implied would be free.

If Apple enters this space, its habit of bundling features into hardware you already own could put real pressure on that pay-forever approach. That is the shift to keep an eye on, whether or not this particular band ever reaches a shelf.