For years, Pixel Watch owners have been walking around with inflated egos — and inflated step counts. Google has finally acknowledged and addressed a persistent bug that caused its smartwatches to overcount steps and, by extension, overestimate calories burned. The fix arrived quietly in a recent Wear OS update, but the implications for users who’ve been making health decisions based on faulty data are anything but quiet.
The problem was straightforward and maddening. Pixel Watch devices were double-counting steps during tracked workouts, logging them both in the exercise session and in the background pedometer simultaneously. If you went for a 5,000-step run using Google’s Fitbit exercise tracking, your watch might report close to 10,000 steps for the day — roughly double the actual figure. Calories burned, which are partly calculated from step data, were similarly inflated. As Android Police reported, this wasn’t some edge case. It affected the core fitness tracking experience that Google markets as a headline feature of its wearable line.
The scope of the issue is striking. Every Pixel Watch generation — from the original through the Pixel Watch 3 — was affected. Users on Google’s support forums and Reddit threads had been flagging the discrepancy for months, some going back well over a year. Many noticed it immediately: their step counts on workout days were wildly higher than what third-party apps or simple mental math would suggest. Others, trusting Google’s hardware and Fitbit’s fitness pedigree, never questioned the numbers.
That trust was misplaced.
Google rolled out a fix through the March 2025 Wear OS update, and it appears to have landed for most users by mid-spring. The update corrects the double-counting logic so that steps recorded during a tracked exercise session are no longer also tallied by the passive step counter. According to Android Police, users who install the update should see their daily step totals drop — sometimes significantly — on days when they log formal workouts. That’s not a bug. That’s accuracy, finally.
But the fix raises uncomfortable questions about Google’s quality assurance process for its wearables division. The Pixel Watch launched in October 2022 as Google’s first in-house smartwatch, built on the back of its $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit. The entire value proposition rested on the idea that Google could marry its software expertise with Fitbit’s decades of fitness tracking experience. Step counting is the most basic metric a fitness wearable offers. It is, in many ways, the table stakes of the category. And Google got it wrong — not for weeks, but for years.
The company hasn’t issued a detailed public statement explaining how the bug persisted across three hardware generations. Google’s support pages acknowledge the fix but don’t elaborate on root cause analysis or why internal testing didn’t catch the duplication. For a company that prides itself on data accuracy in every other product vertical — from Search to Maps to Cloud analytics — the oversight is conspicuous.
There’s a health dimension here that goes beyond vanity metrics. People use calorie burn estimates to make dietary decisions. They set weight loss goals. They calibrate their exercise intensity. If your watch tells you you’ve burned 600 calories on a morning run when the real number is closer to 350, you might eat more than you should, skip an afternoon workout, or simply develop a false sense of your actual fitness level. Multiplied across millions of Pixel Watch users over two-plus years, the aggregate impact on health decision-making is impossible to quantify but easy to imagine.
Fitbit’s legacy hardware didn’t suffer from this particular issue. The double-counting appears to have been introduced in the integration of Fitbit’s tracking algorithms into the Wear OS platform — a process that has been rocky from the start. Early Pixel Watch models were criticized for limited battery life, sluggish performance, and a Fitbit app experience that felt bolted on rather than native. Google has steadily improved the software over successive updates, but this step-counting bug is a reminder that foundational problems can lurk beneath surface-level polish.
The competitive context matters. Apple Watch, Garmin, and Samsung Galaxy Watch devices all handle workout step deduplication correctly — and have for years. It’s a solved problem in the industry. When a user starts a tracked run on an Apple Watch, the device doesn’t also log those same steps in the general activity counter. The fact that Google shipped three generations of hardware without implementing this basic logic is, to put it plainly, embarrassing.
Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 7 and Galaxy Watch Ultra, both running Wear OS with Samsung’s One UI Watch overlay, don’t exhibit the same behavior. Neither do Garmin’s Forerunner or Venu series. This wasn’t an inherent limitation of the Wear OS platform. It was a Google-specific implementation failure in how Fitbit’s exercise tracking interfaced with the system-level pedometer.
Some users on Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) have noted that their historical Fitbit data — viewable in the Fitbit app and now increasingly in Google’s own Pixel health dashboard — still reflects the inflated numbers. Google has not indicated any plans to retroactively correct past data. So if you’ve been a Pixel Watch user since 2022, your fitness history is essentially unreliable for any day you tracked a workout. Years of data, compromised.
And this isn’t just a consumer inconvenience. Fitbit data has been used in clinical research studies. Employers have incorporated Fitbit metrics into corporate wellness programs. Insurance companies have explored using wearable data for policy pricing. The integrity of that data matters beyond any individual user’s daily step goal.
The timing of the fix is notable. Google is expected to announce the Pixel Watch 4 later this year, likely at its fall hardware event. Cleaning up a fundamental accuracy problem before launching new hardware is smart product management — but it also suggests that Google may have been aware of the issue longer than its public communications indicate. Companies don’t typically rush fixes for bugs they just discovered. They rush fixes for bugs that might generate bad press ahead of a product launch.
For existing Pixel Watch owners, the path forward is simple: update your watch software to the latest Wear OS build and expect your step counts to look different. Lower. More honest. If you’ve been hitting 10,000 steps every day with ease, you might find the real number is closer to 7,000 or 8,000 on workout days. That’s a psychological adjustment, but it’s a necessary one.
Google’s wearables ambitions are real and growing. The company has invested billions in Fitbit’s technology and brand, built custom Tensor processors for its watches, and positioned the Pixel Watch as the Android answer to Apple Watch. But trust in a health device is earned through accuracy, consistency, and transparency. On all three counts, this episode represents a significant stumble.
The fix works. The damage, though — to data integrity, to user trust, and to Google’s credibility as a serious health technology company — will take longer to repair than any software update can manage.
WebProNews is an iEntry Publication