Google launches app that will solve Health and Fitness sync across devices

Google’s Health Connect app, which strives to be a one-stop hub for all of your health, fitness, and wellness apps, is coming out of “Early Access” status and is now available on the Play Store in Beta. Google made the announcement via a blog post today, where it highlighted the benefits of this app for both the developers and the users and announced the support of more fitness partners.

The app was originally announced at Google I/O earlier this year as a new platform that Google and Samsung were working on together in order to bring connectivity between apps so that they can share user health and fitness data across devices. During its “Early Access” period, the app saw some limited support from Samsung Health, Google Fit, and Fitbit (starting with version 3.69 of the app). However, now that it is Beta status, it includes integrations with an additional 10 fitness apps, notably MyFitnessPal, Peloton, and WeightWatchers.

Apart from the benefits of being able to manage from just one app all the health data that all these apps can input data into, it also gives you a single place to manage your privacy settings. For Developers, it reduces fragmentation. Google explains that in the past, developers had to set up multiple API connections between apps to share data, and each integration was expensive to build and keep up. This made it hard for users to get access to this data so they could use it in other apps and made it hard for developers to share said data.

Previously, users had to navigate to multiple apps to manage data permissions. And, developers had to build out permissions management UIs themselves.

With Health Connect, users can easily manage permissions in a single place, with granular controls to see which apps are accessing data at any given time.

Android Developers Blog

Now, with Health Connect, if you complete a workout on an app like Peloton, your Fitbit stats will reflect that and adjust calories accordingly. The same goes for apps like MyFitnessPal, which already has some integrations built in, but now can access data more timely and accurately.

The Health Connect app is available in Beta on the Google Play Store, but once you install it, you won’t see it in your app drawer, as it can only be opened from a Quick Settings tile. When you first open it, though, there isn’t much to it if you haven’t already set it up for access in any of your existing health and fitness apps.

Fitbit users may find it beneficial to set up access from within the Fitbit app by navigating to Settings > Health Connect and then toggling on the option to “Sync with Health Connect.” Once that option is on, you will receive another prompt to confirm that you want this feature on, followed by the Android privacy settings.

If you use multiple devices or simply use different apps to keep track of your health and fitness, installing this app and proceeding with the setup might be the solution you have been looking for in order to have all your health data in one place. For example, even though I use Fitbit to keep track of workouts, I do not use Fitbit for logging my meals. Finally, with this solution, I can view the calories I’ve consumed while inside the Fitbit app without having to switch back and forth