I’d actually heard about the Bevel app before Whoop, makers of some of the best fitness trackers (albeit also some of the most expensive) filed a lawsuit against the creators of the app. It was mainly through ads on my Instagram feed. I eventually bowed to the pressure and downloaded it to see what it was all about.
Then news broke that Whoop had sued Bevel for various things including patent infringements and creating an app that had a likeness to Whoop’s app. So it felt like an apt time to see whether Whoop had a reason to be annoyed to the extent that it had to get legal about it all..
Bevel, which is described as an AI health companion app and a competitor to some of the best fitness apps, launched in 2024. Whoop launched in 2012, so has been out in public for a lot longer than Bevel. Like its hardware, Whoop’s companion app has gone through some changes. Whether those changes were influenced by Bevel or vice versa is a matter that will no doubt be heavily discussed as part of that lawsuit.
Article continues below
I wanted to see for myself if the Bevel app was exactly like the Whoop one. Here’s what I found out after using it for a few weeks.
Before talking about the app, it’s worth explaining how Bevel actually works. Unlike Whoop, there isn’t Bevel hardware you need to buy. Instead, it lets you sync data from wearables you already own. That currently includes the Apple Watch, Oura Ring 4 and the best Garmin watches. It also works with Strava if you mainly track your workouts there too.
It will actually let you sync data from multiple devices and also ensure you’re not pushing duplicate data from those devices into the app. So if you take your Oura to bed to track sleep and do everything else with your Apple Watch during the day, you can have all the data in one place.
The app is free to use, with a subscription element also available to unlock additional features. The subscription works out to paying $79.99/£49.99 a year to subscribe. To put that into context, the cheapest Whoop subscription tier costs £169/$199 a year.
Bevel does give you the option to trial the premium version for 14 days as well before deciding whether you want to pay up. I decided to try the free version first before moving onto premium to see what you gain from upgrading.
How Bevel works
The Bevel app is essentially broken into four sections. You have the main Homescreen where you’ll see a snapshot of your data. There’s also a journal page, a place dedicated to collating your fitness data and a tab for showing more health and nutrition-centric metrics like weight and heart rate variability baselines.
As mentioned, all of this data is driven from the device you decide to pair to it. So if your device can’t track a particular piece of data, it won’t be shown. I was testing it with a Garmin Forerunner 970, so only the data I didn’t see was weight. Had I been manually inputting that into Garmin’s Connect app, then that would’ve been pulled through as well.
Straight off the bat, that homescreen does scream Whoop app. Mainly through the inclusion of Strain, Recovery and Sleep progress rings, helping you understand the strain you’ve put on your body, how much recovery time you need and how much sleep you’ve banked. Whoop uses the same metrics, it just orders them slightly differently on the homescreen.
Bevel has a journal feature, just like Whoop has. It also has a health monitor section that hones in on similar data such as temperature, resting heart rate and SpO2 levels. There seems to be a bit more of an emphasis from Bevel on your fitness data, simply because it’s able to harness that data from devices that are more complete in sports tracking terms compared to Whoop, which doesn’t record GPS data. You also have the ability to build workout templates inside of Bevel’s app.
When you go Premium, you’re basically turning on Bevel’s AI-powered intelligence insights to get more tailored guidance and recommendations from your data. Again, this is a feature that Whoop offers through its own companion app, with the premium subscription built in. These insights appear below the Strain, Recovery and Sleep rings on the homescreen. You can expand the insights to launch Bevel’s AI coach that you can ask about your data or even whether it’s the smart move to workout that day or put it off for another day.
Does Whoop have a case?
’ll start by saying that I’ve really liked using Bevel. It’s great that you can pull in data from multiple devices. I know my Oura Ring 4 is a better, more reliable sleep tracker than my Garmin watch. I also know that I can trust the heart rate data from my Garmin, especially as I pair it to a heart rate monitor during exercise. I also appreciated Bevel’s approach to collating fitness data. It made identifying good or bad trends in my data an easy and straightforward thing to do.
On the premium front, Bevel’s AI coach is one of the better examples of an AI coach I’ve experienced on a fitness app. The insights felt refreshingly concise and engaging enough to pay attention to. Crunching your data to respond to queries can be a little slow at times, but what it generates can be useful enough to shape decisions made about your day or night.
So does Whoop have a case? Well, there’s no doubt that many of Bevel’s features look a lot like Whoop’s ones. The rings, health monitor and journal definitely stick out as being presented in a similar way. The big question is who did them first? There are suggestions that Bevel might have been first to include some of those elements that also appear in Whoop’s app.
Fundamentally, while Bevel’s app is similar in look, my experiences have still felt different enough. Whether that’s the presentation of certain data or the fact Whoop seems to place a bit more focus on aspects like sleep compared to Bevel, which imports data from other fitness ecosystems.
If someone asked me for recommendations for an app that feels like Whoop and doesn’t require a Whoop, Bevel would instantly spring to mind. However this lawsuit plays out, I’m hoping Bevel is still around after it. The free version has certainly been good enough to stay on my phone homescreen.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/tfkg5X869vd7mirHbBhdUa-2560-80.jpg
Source link
