If you want to use tech to monitor your fitness, but don’t want to buy a fitness tracker, then you’ve got only a few options. Smart rings are one such pick, but even though they’ve been in the market for over a decade, they’re still not a mainstream gadget. Some are wondering, though, now that more and more options are being released: are smart rings finally ready for the mainstream?

The best smart ring may be a tempting buy for people who want to monitor their fitness but want to avoid strapping an entire tracker or watch to their wrist. They’re also suitable for certain other smartwatch tasks: you can load them with NFC to open your car or pay from your virtual wallet, track your sleep from just one finger, and some of them tell you the time.

But there’s basically only one place you’ll find a smart ring now: on the finger of a tech journalist. Out and about in public, you’re more likely to see a flying pig than something like our favorite pick, the Oura Ring 4. And as a tech journalist of many years, it wouldn’t take very many fingers to count how many I’ve seen on my peers. My fingers doing that counting would also be smart ring-free.

There are only a few brands releasing smart rings right now, but what will it take for smart rings to hit the mainstream? Given my years of covering fitness tech, and having seen certain other kinds of gadget make it big, here are the hurdles I see the kind of tech having to overcome before they’re finally ready.

Sizing up a problem

A very basic issue makes smart rings an intimidating buy for non-owners. Go over to buy an option from Ultrahuman or RingConn or Oura, and you’ll have to select your size. Not just small or large, but a number from 4 to 15 in some cases.

If you buy jewelry, you likely know your ring size, but for the rest of us this is tantamount to a foreign language – many of us struggle to remember our shoe size, let alone ring size. Figuring it out isn’t rocket science, but you generally require a tape measure to do it vaguely, or to use a kit or visit a jeweler to do it precisely. 

Given that fitness trackers and smartwatches are one-size-fits-all with their adjustable straps, this extra step of admin may seem daunting or off-putting to new buyers. That’s especially true given that picking a size too small means you won’t be able to wear the ring, and too big runs the risk of it falling off or measuring your vitals poorly. It’s hard to imagine smart rings becoming mainstream until they’re easier to pick up on a whim, or if they become more readily available in high street stores so you can test them out.

The fitness jump

One of the main draws of smart rings is their ability to monitor your body. They can keep tabs on your heart rate, sleep cycle and steps, and by all accounts, the best options do this very well. But there’s a huge gulf between what a smart ring will do, and what even the cheapest fitness tracker can handle. 

The Ultrahuman Ring Air and RingConn Gen 2 will monitor only a small handful of activities and the Oura Ring 4 can’t even do that. These gadgets aren’t really designed for frequent fitness fans, people doing intensive activities, or those looking to build their body over a long period of time. 

However fitness tech is an aspirational buy: you’ll pick up running headphones to help you run, a cycle computer to help you cycle, or sleep tracker to improve your sleep. And so without a really competitive sell in helping you with your fitness goals, it’s hard to recommend a smart ring as a smart buy over rival gadgets.

This, frankly, is not going to change until smart rings do. We’re going to need to see options released which match, if not exceed, what fitness trackers do, if they’re going to stand as viable alternatives to wrist-mounted options. 

Beyond fitness

A similar point to the above one stands regarding non-fitness features. At the moment, smart rings are popular for NFC – the McLear NFC Ring is sometimes credited as the first such product – but they rarely offer you much more than that.

Bear in mind that fitness trackers let you control your music, manage notifications, check the weather, set timers and alarms and, in some cases, access smart assistants or your other home tech gadgets. The vast majority of smart rings don’t even have screens, let alone a way to use a range of features like this.

The budget problem

The established smart rings on the market are staggeringly expensive. The cheapest option in our list of the best smart rings costs $200, and some of the pricier models also require you to pay regular subscriptions. It’s hard to imagine someone becoming a smart ring convert if they can’t purchase an affordable model to test.

We can use this as a barometer of popularity too. You know that a gadget has ‘made it’ when cheap brands begin to release more affordable alternatives – I’m not talking about single-digit-dollar Temu versions, but genuine brands releasing versions for cheaper prices. However if you look on Amazon, you’ll see that the smart ring market is split between the pricey big-name brands like Oura and RingConn, and bargain bin versions. There’s nothing in between.

Until we see mid-range manufacturers releasing rival smart bands in the $80-$150 price range, it’s hard to argue that there’s a real ‘smart ring market’ right now. It’s still a niche by the word’s textbook definition: a specialized market segment.

This could change soon. With established tech brands like Samsung dipping their toes in the smart ring market, it might signal to other companies that smart rings are moving towards the mainstream. However you’d have thought that, after the Galaxy Ring’s 2024 release, we’d have seen something a little sooner…

Do these changes seem likely in 2026?

We’ve run through some issues with smart rings as they stand: namely, that the price and size situation discourage new buyers, and that the fitness and feature sets don’t do enough to solve existing problems with fitness tech. But could this change, pushing smart rings to become mainstream soon?

Looking ahead to 2026’s release slate, we’re bound to see new releases. As I mentioned when covering big announcements to look for at CES 2026 in January, smart rings are expected to be so popular that the event organizers wrote a blog post saying as much. Most big smart ring makers are exhibiting at the conference, whether to show old products or new ones, and we’ll likely see new competitors show up too. 

However there’s no indication that major existing companies have smart rings in the works. Someone like Apple, Google or Amazon releasing such a gadget would catapult the gadget into the big leagues, but that seems unlikely, and we don’t even know whether Samsung is working on a sophomore effort to its Galaxy Ring.

Instead, any progress that smart rings make towards the mainstream in 2026 will be small steps, rather than a large leap. Fixing any of the issues listed above will be solid progress, but like any kind of brand-new gadget, they’ll simply need to exist and be on the market for a while before people get used to the idea of them.