Smart rings promised a wearable revolution – now they’re fighting to stay relevant

For a brief moment, smart rings felt like the next great leap in wearables. Smaller than smartwatches, subtler than bands and pitched as something you could wear all day and forget about.

In short, rings promised deep health insights without the digital noise. A few years on, that promise hasn’t disappeared, but the momentum has undeniably slowed.

The smart ring market hasn’t collapsed, but it has stalled. Instead of a flood of new ideas, we’ve seen incremental updates in 2025, a pivot towards fashion, and a category increasingly defined by what it can’t do rather than what it can.

As we head towards 2026, the question isn’t whether smart rings have a future; it’s what shape that future takes, and who’s still standing when it arrives.

The circular problem

At the heart of the issue is the form factor itself. A smart ring has to be small, circular and unobtrusive. That’s its entire appeal and its biggest limitation.

The Oura Ring 4 has no screen to work with, the Ultrahuman Ring AIR looks almost indistinguishable from rival rings at a glance, and the RingConn Gen 2 Air leaves very little physical space for sensors, batteries or meaningful interaction.

Once you’ve measured sleep, heart rate, HRV and skin temperature, there isn’t much left to add without fundamentally changing what a ring is.

That’s why so many recent updates have been software-led. Oura, Ultrahuman and RingConn have all pushed app redesigns, new insights and smarter interpretation of existing data.

The problem is that software updates don’t generate the same hype as hardware. They often roll out quietly, go unnoticed by casual users and struggle to convince anyone on the fence to finally buy in.

Even when the improvements are meaningful, they rarely feel exciting. In a market driven by novelty, “your smart ring will count steps more accurately” doesn’t move the needle.

A market with too few players

Another issue is simple saturation, or rather, the lack of it. There are only a handful of serious smart ring makers operating globally: Oura, Ultrahuman, RingConn, Samsung, Amazfit and Circular, with the odd niche entrant appearing every so often.

That means only a couple of genuinely new products land each year. Compare that to smartwatches, earbuds and other wearables, where constant iteration keeps products in the public eye. With rings, long gaps between launches make it easy for the category to fade into the background.

It doesn’t help that some of the biggest names in wearables are still absent. Apple and Garmin have notably ring-shaped holes in their product portfolios.

Their entry would almost certainly push prices down, force faster innovation and legitimise the category for a much wider audience. For now, their absence has the opposite effect: fewer competitors, less urgency, slower progress.

Samsung was meant to change that. The Galaxy Ring was positioned as the start of something bigger, but expectations of a rapid follow-up have already cooled. If one of the world’s largest electronics brands isn’t aggressively iterating, it sends a worrying signal to the rest of the market.

When fashion does the heavy lifting

Recent launches have leaned hard into design, materials and collaborations, positioning smart rings as lifestyle accessories first and health wearables second. Ultrahuman’s Diesel collaboration is a perfect example, while Oura has experimented with premium finishes and charging accessories to keep things feeling fresh.

There’s nothing wrong with this pivot – in fact, it’s probably necessary. If the hardware can’t change much, aesthetics become the battleground. The risk is that smart rings start to feel more like jewellery with sensors than serious tech products, which limits how much people are willing to pay or rely on them.

At the same time, attention has shifted elsewhere. Smart glasses, such as the Oakley Meta Vanguards or the Oakley Meta HSTN, have become the new wearable obsession, sucking oxygen out of the room just as rings were trying to find their second wind. Compared to AI-powered glasses with cameras, speakers and assistants baked in, a sleep-tracking ring suddenly feels… quiet.

From hero product to sidekick

There’s another, more existential threat emerging: smart rings being repositioned as accessories rather than standalone devices.

Increasingly, rings are announced as controllers for mixed-reality headsets or smart glasses, valued for gesture input rather than health tracking.

While that use case makes sense technically, it risks undermining the category’s original promise. A ring designed to control something else feels less essential than one designed to understand you.

Once a product becomes a peripheral, its value proposition shrinks, and so does its audience.

So where does that leave 2026?

Despite everything, smart rings aren’t out of ideas yet. They’re just at a crossroads.

True innovation still exists, but it’s expensive and risky. Concepts like the Pebble Index 01 show that the ring form factor doesn’t have to be locked into wellness at all.

That device ditches health tracking entirely, reframing the ring as an input tool for AI and memory capture. It’s a reminder that the category only stagnates if companies keep solving the same problem over and over again.

There’s also room for smarter material choices and bolder design decisions. Screens on rings sound far-fetched, but so did curved displays on phones once. New alloys, ceramic blends or modular shells could allow brands to differentiate physically, not just cosmetically.

Fitness-first rings are another untapped avenue. Most current models shy away from exercise, asking users to remove them during strength training or high-impact sessions.

A soft-shell or gym-safe ring designed to be worn while lifting, running, or training could unlock an entirely new audience and finally answer the question of why a ring is better than a watch.

The hype problem

What smart rings arguably need most is better storytelling. Collaborations shouldn’t just be about looks; they should tap into culture in the same way LEGO has done with franchises.

Limited editions, seasonal drops and recognisable themes could keep rings in the conversation between hardware cycles. If people queue for sneakers, there’s no reason they wouldn’t get excited about a genuinely desirable wearable, as long as it feels relevant.

There are also strong signals that the category may drift further towards utility. Contactless payments, secure authentication and identity features feel like natural next steps, especially as NFC tech improves. A ring that replaces a wallet, key or access card would instantly justify its place on your finger.

A quieter, sharper future

Smart rings probably won’t dominate the wearable conversation in 2026, and that might be fine. Their future looks less like a mass-market explosion and more like specialisation.

Some brands will double down on health and move closer to medical credibility. Others will pivot towards fashion and culture. A few will abandon wellness entirely and reimagine what a ring can do. The danger lies in doing none of those things decisively.

The smart ring market doesn’t need more incremental updates. It needs conviction. Because if rings don’t redefine themselves soon, they risk becoming the most forgettable wearable of the decade — small, elegant, and quietly left behind.