Turns out Apple really is building a Whoop rival

Back in August we wrote about Apple possibly building a screenless fitness band. At the time it was still very much a maybe, industrial design teams poking around at concepts, nothing you could point to and say this is happening. That has changed.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is back with a fresh report, and this time the language is different. Apple isn’t just exploring an idea anymore, it has actual prototypes sitting somewhere in Cupertino. They’re described as a thin fabric band paired with a sensor equipped computing module.

From a maybe to an actual thing

The project is currently in what Bloomberg calls the technology investigation phase. In English, this means the stage where Apple works out whether the sensors, the battery and the software can actually come together into something worth shipping.

Which is why the timeline attached to this is so far out. Bloomberg says a launch, if it happens at all, wouldn’t come before 2028.

That lines up with something we said back in May when first floated the idea of an Apple Watch Air, a lightweight health tracker that sits alongside the main Apple Watch rather than replacing it. Apple clearly likes that framing, wear the Watch for maps, workouts and notifications, then switch to the band for sleep or for days you just don’t want a screen on your wrist.

The people behind it matter here

What’s new and genuinely worth paying attention to is who’s backing this internally. Gurman names Eddy Cue and Tim Cook as supporters of the project. Cue took over Apple’s health division last October after Jeff Williams left, and this might be a hint of the direction he wants to take it.

It also fits a pattern we have been tracking for a while. Garmin has already proven a screenless band can complement rather than replace a full watch with CIRQA, and Google did the same thing at a lower price point with Fitbit Air. Apple watching two competitors validate the category before committing real engineering resources isn’t surprising, it’s just how Apple tends to operate.

Don’t expect this soon

Just yesterday, we looked at how how Garmin, Oura, Whoop and Apple’s own readiness scores all share the same evidence gap. It’s a good reminder that even if Apple ships this thing in 2028, the software side of health wearables still has real questions to answer. That’s on top of everything else Apple has going on with its current Watch lineup rebooting issues.

For now this stays a prototype, and prototypes get killed inside Apple all the time. But the fact that Tim Cook is reportedly involved, that there’s a defined design direction, and that the timing lines up with everything else happening in this category, makes this feel less like a rumour and more like a project with real momentum behind it.