This $50 Samsung Galaxy Watch accessory is a no-brainer

If you regularly wake up groggy and your first impulse is to check your wrist for a sleep score, congratulations, you are in too deep with health tracking. Same here. At this point, I think that the best accessory you can buy for your Samsung Galaxy Watch is not a strap, a charger, or a case. It is the Galaxy Fit 3. Yes, the roughly $50 fitness tracker. And yes, I understand how silly it is to claim another wearable as an accessory to a smartwatch. But hear me out, because this might genuinely be the best quality-of-life hack I’ve added to my Galaxy setup in years.

The Galaxy Fit 3 is an easier bedmate than a watch

Sleep tracking is an addictive curse. It has not fixed my terrible sleep nor improved my feelings about that terrible sleep. Yet here I am, logging every night as if knowing my sleep animal will suddenly turn me into a morning person. At a minimum, I am always trying to reduce friction. Most recently, that meant swapping my Galaxy Watch Ultra for Samsung’s cheapest wearable as part of my bedtime routine.

If you sleep with your smartwatch on, you know the tradeoffs. You want the data, but could really do without the weight. Modern smartwatches are bulky by necessity thanks to advanced sensors, chips, and battery cells. They also tout ever-growing (and increasingly vibrant) AMOLED displays that look great during the day, but turn into bedside floodlights at 2 AM. Most importantly, they don’t offer endless battery life, and sleep tracking steals away the most convenient time to charge a smartwatch.

The Fit 3 solves all of this. For starters, it’s light, thin, unobtrusive, and basically unnoticeable in bed. The band-style device weighs just 36.8g compared to the Galaxy Watch Ultra’s hulking 60.5g build. The Fit 3 also packs a significantly smaller display than my smartwatch, and I can configure it permanently to bedtime settings, turning brightness all the way down, muting notifications, and generally disabling the device screen while it’s on my wrist. No tilt-to-wake, no midnight Morse-code vibrations, just insights waiting for me in the morning. Samsung funnels everything into the same Samsung Health app as my Galaxy Watch Ultra, so my data stays continuous even when the more expensive watch is resting on its puck to charge.

This is key because the Fit 3 battery lasts long enough that I rarely have to think about it. The tracker clocks roughly two weeks of use between charges, and that’s assuming you’re going to use it a lot more than just for sleeping. So far, it’s looking like it can last even more with all the settings I’ve disabled. Meanwhile, the Galaxy Watch Ultra taps out at about two days. My dual-device setup makes that meager battery stat much less of an issue. Follow along with my madness.

My smartwatch wakes up fully charged and ready

The real magic of this combo is that my Galaxy Watch Ultra spends the night charging to a complete 100%. Every morning I wake up, switch devices, and put on a flagship smartwatch that is ready for a full day of notifications, apps, workouts, and everything else I rely on. I never need to manage a mid-day charging schedule anymore to keep my watch ready for sleep tracking, since I have offloaded that to the Fit 3. And I never start a GPS workout wondering if the battery will survive the route. Of course it will, because my watch is always charged.

My only complaint about this whole “hack” is that device switching could be smoother. I need to switch manually in the app because auto-switching is not supported on non-Samsung phones. Even so, the process takes only a few seconds.

Reddit’s GalaxyWatch and GalaxyFit communities have been circling this idea for months, too. While not everyone runs a full day/night rotation, plenty of users talk about buying the Fit 3 specifically for sleep because it’s lighter, more comfortable, and integrates cleanly with Samsung Health. Others mention using multiple Samsung wearables for different parts of the day, or switching to the Fit 3 at night to avoid the bulk and battery drain of a full smartwatch. It’s not a mainstream setup, but it’s definitely not unheard of, and the logic is always the same: better comfort, better battery, same sleep data.

Here at Android Authority, we’ve seen this pattern too. Calvin’s dual-Galaxy-Watch experiment from a couple of years back already proved that wearing two devices can make sense if you care about uninterrupted activity and sleep tracking. My other colleague, Luka, has been running his own Galaxy Watch and Fit 3 rotation as well, partly for testing and partly for daily sanity. He’s even gone so far as to pine for a screen-free model that would serve his setup more efficiently. A sleep tracking ring would be ideal, but the only Galaxy Ring now is much more expensive than a Fit 3.

In short, the idea of adding an extra Galaxy (Fit 3 or older Watch model) to your current Galaxy Watch is not as unhinged as it sounds. What is slightly unhinged, maybe, is calling another tracker the best accessory for the Galaxy Watch. Logically, that honor should go to a comfortable strap, a convenient charger, or a sturdy, protective case. Yet, none of those improve sleep tracking, extend usable battery life, or create a smoother 24-hour experience in Samsung’s ecosystem. The Galaxy Fit 3 manages all of that for about 50 bucks.