Google’s Health Connect app, which strives to be a one-stop hub for all 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 through a blog post today, where he highlighted the benefits of this app for both developers and 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 to bring connectivity between apps so they can share user health and fitness data across devices. During its “Early Access” period, the app had limited support from Samsung Health, Google Fit, and Fitbit (as of app version 3.69). However, now that it’s in Beta status, it includes integrations with 10 additional fitness apps, notably MyFitnessPal, Peloton, and WeightWatchers.
In addition to the benefits of being able to manage from a single app all the health data that all of 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 maintain. This made it difficult for users to access this data for use in other applications and made it difficult for developers to share such data.
Previously, users had to navigate to various apps to manage data permissions. And the developers had to create the permissions management user interfaces themselves.
With Health Connect, users can easily manage permissions in one place, with granular controls to see which apps are accessing data at any given time.
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Now with Health Connect, if you complete a workout in 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 you can access data in a more timely and accurate manner.
The Health Connect app is available in Beta at the google play storebut 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’s not much to do if you haven’t already set it up to access any of your existing health and fitness apps.
Fitbit users may find it helpful to set up access from the Fitbit app by navigating to Settings > Health Connect and then turning on the “Sync with Health Connect” option. Once that option is turned on, you’ll get another message to confirm that you want to turn this feature on, followed by your Android privacy settings.
If you use multiple devices or just use different apps to track your health and fitness, installing this app and continuing with setup might be the solution you’ve been looking for to have all your health data in one place. For example, while I use Fitbit to track workouts, I don’t use Fitbit to log my meals. Finally, with this solution, I can see the calories I’ve consumed while inside the Fitbit app without having to switch back and forth.
