If you want to monitor your fitness using technology but don’t want to buy a fitness tracker, you have few options. Smart rings are one such choice, but despite being on the market for over a decade, they are still not a mainstream gadget. However, with more options now coming to market, some are wondering: Are smart rings finally ready for the mainstream?
The best smart ring can be a tempting purchase for people who want to monitor their fitness but avoid strapping an entire tracker or watch to their wrist. They’re also useful for certain other smartwatch tasks: you can equip them with NFC to open your car or pay with your virtual wallet, track your sleep with just a finger, and some of them tell you the time.
But there’s basically only one place you can find a smart ring these days: on a tech journalist’s finger. When out and about in public, you’re more likely to see a flying pig than something like our favorite, the Oura Ring 4. And as a long-time tech journalist, I wouldn’t need many fingers to count how many I’ve seen on my colleagues. My fingers that would do this counting would be intelligent even without wrestling.
There are currently only a few brands launching smart rings, but what will it take for smart rings to go mainstream? Having been involved in fitness technology for years and having seen certain other devices take off, here’s how I see the hurdles this type of technology must overcome before it’s finally ready for use.
Assess a problem
A very fundamental problem makes smart rings a daunting purchase for non-owners. Go to Ultrahuman, RingConn or Oura to purchase an option and select your size. Not just small or large, but in some cases a number from 4 to 15.
If you shop for jewelry, you probably know your ring size, but for the rest of us, that’s equivalent to a foreign language – many of us have a hard time remembering our shoe size, let alone our ring size. It’s not rocket science to figure it out, but generally you’ll need a tape measure to approximate it, or you can use a kit or visit a jeweler to get it precise.
Given that fitness trackers and smartwatches are one size fits all with their adjustable wristbands, this additional administrative step can seem daunting or off-putting to new buyers. This is especially true because if you choose a size that is too small, you will not be able to wear the ring. If the size is too large, there is a risk that it will fall or your vitals will be poorly measured. It’s hard to imagine smart rings becoming mainstream until they’re easier to pick up on a whim or more readily available in stores so you can try them out.
The fitness leap
One of the main benefits of smart rings is their ability to monitor your body. You can keep track of your heart rate, sleep cycle, and steps, and the best options seem to do this very well. But there’s a big gap between the performance of a smart ring and the performance of even the cheapest fitness tracker.
The Ultrahuman Ring Air and RingConn Gen 2 only monitor a small handful of activities and the Oura Ring 4 can’t even do that. These machines are not really suitable for heavy fitness enthusiasts, people who do intense physical activity, or people who want to build their body over a long period of time.
However, fitness technology is a worthwhile purchase: you buy running headphones to help you run, a bike computer to help you ride a bike, or a sleep tracker to improve your sleep. Without a truly competitive offering to help you achieve your fitness goals, it’s difficult to recommend a smart ring as a smart purchase over competing devices.
This honestly won’t change until smart rings do. We need to bring options to market that match or exceed the performance characteristics of fitness trackers if they are to provide a viable alternative to wrist-worn options.
Beyond fitness
A similar point to the above applies regarding non-fitness characteristics. Currently, smart rings for NFC are popular – the McLear NFC Ring is sometimes cited as the first product of its kind – but they rarely give you much more than that.
Keep in mind that fitness trackers allow you to control your music, manage notifications, check the weather, set timers and alarms, and in some cases access smart assistants or other home technology devices. The vast majority of smart rings don’t even have a screen, let alone the ability to use a range of such features.
The budget problem
The established smart rings on the market are horribly expensive. The cheapest option in our list of the best smart rings costs $200, and some of the more expensive models also require you to pay a regular subscription. It’s hard to imagine someone becoming a smart ring switcher if they can’t purchase an affordable model to test out.
We can also use this as a barometer of popularity. You know a device has “made it” when budget brands start releasing more affordable alternatives – I’m not talking about Temu versions for single-digit dollar amounts, but real brands releasing versions at more affordable prices. However, if you look at Amazon, you’ll see that the smart ring market is split between the expensive big brands like Oura and RingConn and bargain versions. There is nothing in between.
Until we see mid-range manufacturers launch competing smart bands in the $80 to $150 price range, it’s hard to argue that there is currently a true “smart ring market.” In terms of the textbook definition, it is still a niche: a specialized market segment.
That could change soon. With established tech brands like Samsung diving into the smart ring market, this could be a signal to other companies that smart rings are moving toward the mainstream. However, with the Galaxy Ring releasing in 2024, you would have thought we would have seen something a little sooner…
Are these changes likely in 2026?
We’ve encountered a few problems with smart rings in their current form: namely, that the price and size situation discourages new buyers and that the fitness and feature set are not enough to solve existing problems with fitness technology. But could that change and smart rings soon become mainstream?
Looking at the release list in 2026, we are sure to see new releases. As I mentioned when reporting on key announcements to watch for at CES 2026 in January, smart rings are expected to be so popular that event organizers have written a blog post expressing this. Most major smart ring manufacturers are exhibiting at the conference, whether to show old or new products, and we’ll likely see new competitors as well.
However, there is no indication that any major existing companies have smart rings in the works. Someone like Apple, Google, or Amazon releasing a device like this would catapult the device into the big leagues, but that seems unlikely, and we don’t even know if Samsung is working on a second attempt at its Galaxy Ring.
Instead, any progress smart rings make toward the mainstream in 2026 will be small steps rather than one giant leap. Fixing the issues listed above will be solid progress, but like any kind of brand new device, they simply need to exist and be on the market for a while before people get used to the idea.
