Apple Watch Without A Screen? New Leak Claims Whoop Rival In Testing
Prototypes of a Whoop-style band are in testing inside Apple, but the company won't decide whether to ship one until at least 2028, entering a category Whoop, Oura, Fitbit, and Garmin have already spent years building out.
Apple is developing a screenless health and fitness tracker designed to compete with Whoop, Bloomberg reported Monday.
The device is still in what Apple internally calls a “technology investigation” phase, an exploratory stage where the company builds prototypes without committing to a release.
Those prototypes reportedly pair a thin fabric band with a sensor-equipped computing module, worn like Whoop’s screen-free trackers rather than a traditional Apple Watch.
Tim Cook and Apple’s Services and Health chief Eddy Cue are both said to support the project, though Apple has not decided whether to bring it to market, and any release reportedly would not arrive before 2028.
A Health Team With New Leadership and a New Playbook
The project’s momentum traces back to a leadership change.
Cue took over Apple’s health and fitness teams last October after Jeff Williams departed, and 9to5Mac reported that he has since pushed the group toward simpler, single-purpose interfaces like the ones Whoop and Oura wearables built their businesses on.
That shift already shows up in software: the Apple Watch Series 12 now includes a Whoop-style readiness score and continuous heart-rate sampling, features Apple added after its own research comparing wearables reportedly showed how well Whoop’s device performed on accuracy.
A standalone screenless band would extend that same monitoring philosophy to people who find a display, or a smartwatch on their wrist overnight, unnecessary or uncomfortable.
Whoop’s $10 Billion Valuation Explains the Timing
Whoop’s valuation has reportedly climbed past $10 billion, while Oura is preparing for a US IPO after selling 3.6 million rings in the 12 months to June and growing revenue 74% to $1.21 billion in the nine months to June, according to Reuters.
Those numbers reframe what looked like a niche category as a genuine, fast-growing market that Apple, still dominant in smartwatches broadly, has no meaningful foothold in.
Garmin shares fell on the news of Apple’s interest, per Yahoo, a reaction that reveals more about how thin the moat around screenless fitness tracking still is than about anything Apple has actually built.
The category also isn’t just Whoop and Oura anymore; Google released its screenless Fitbit Air, while Polar and Garmin have both shipped their own screen-free competitors this year, leaving Apple as a late entrant in a crowded space.
Apple’s Caution Here Looks Deliberate, Not Slow
A 2028 timeline, at minimum, for a wearable product still in early prototyping is unusually cautious even by Apple’s standards, and that caution is probably the point.
Apple knows launching a rushed, inferior screenless band to rival Whoop and Oura would damage its credibility far more than skipping the market entirely.
Handing this new category to services chief Eddy Cue over hardware engineers reveals Apple’s true focus: building long-term health data engagement and Fitness+ subscriptions instead of relying on individual hardware purchases.
Oura’s own IPO pitch rests on exactly that recurring-revenue story. If Apple ships this band at all, expect it to arrive already wired into a subscription, not sold as a one-off gadget the way Whoop originally was.
Source: Apple Developing New Fitness Tracker Aimed at Rivaling Whoop
