Consumer Tech Wire — Independent Reporting on the Tech People Use

Google's Fitbit Air Brings AI Food Recognition to a $130 Band

CONSUMER TECH WIRE

MOUNTAIN VIEW · AUG 8 · HEALTH TECH

Google's Fitbit Air Brings AI Food Recognition to a $130 Band

The screenless Fitbit Air ships with six months of Fitbit Premium and a Gemini-based photo food-logging mode in the companion app, putting AI calorie estimation inside a hardware purchase for the first time.

By Ronan Whitfield-Asari

MyFitnessPal Owner Explores Sale as Calorie-App Category Consolidates

Francisco Partners has held early conversations with advisers about a sale of MyFitnessPal, Reuters reported, months after the calorie-tracking application itself acquired the AI photo-logging startup Cal AI.

By Helena Rosenberg-Vance

NEW YORK · AUG 1 · PRODUCTIVITY

Students Head Back to Campus Carrying a Subscription Stack They Didn't Build

Consumer groups say the app subscriptions students accumulate over a summer — trials taken during exams, family plans that lapse, student tiers that quietly expire at graduation — now form a recurring cost that most households never audit before term starts.

By Ronan Whitfield-Asari

NEW YORK · JUL 22 · SMART HOME

Smart Scales in 2026: What the Body-Composition Numbers Actually Tell You

Consumer bioimpedance scales now report body-fat percentage, muscle mass, visceral fat and more, but clinicians say only the weight and its trend line are dependable enough to act on.

By Ronan Whitfield-Asari

SAN FRANCISCO · JUN 27 · AI TOOLS

AI Coding Assistants Enter a Price War as Rivals Undercut Each Other

A cluster of price cuts and raised usage limits across the AI pair-programming category in June has analysts describing the market as a full price war, with vendors trading cheaper monthly plans and higher request caps to hold onto developers.

By Ronan Whitfield-Asari

WASHINGTON · JUN 19 · PRIVACY & SECURITY

The Data-Broker Gap That Still Lets Health Apps Share Your Logs

State privacy laws now cover much of what fitness and nutrition apps collect, but a de-identification carve-out still lets logging data move to third-party brokers. Here is what regulators say and how users can opt out.

By Dr. Priscilla Goyal-Norris

MOUNTAIN VIEW · MAY 15 · PRIVACY & SECURITY

Signal Ships Quarterly On-Device Identity-Key Rotation, Tightening Long-Term Compromise Window

The encrypted-messaging foundation on Thursday released a desktop and mobile client update that introduces automatic quarterly rotation of long-term identity keys, with no user-visible safety-number disruption. The change closes one of the protocol's longest-standing post-compromise recovery gaps, a Stanford cryptographer said.

By Ronan Whitfield-Asari