If you’ve ever used multiple health and fitness tracking apps on your smartphone, you know the pain of tracking across multiple seemingly unconnected apps. , may be able to work with other health apps to collect data, but it is up to individual developers to support other individual platforms. For example, MyFitnessPal does not have Mi Fit integration, but it supports Google Fit, so connect Mi Fit to Google Fit and then Google Fit to MyFitnessPal. It’s a nightmare for people with multiple apps, but Google has a solution. Health Connect.
Android has a myriad of health-tracking apps, but not all of them cover every vital you want to track. Apps can choose to share data with other apps on an individual basis, which was previously not the case. one API available for health apps to share data. Health Connect is Google’s answer to this problem as it acts as an intermediary for these tracking apps to share data with each other. Previously, if MyFitnessPal wanted to pull data from Samsung Health, Fitbit, and Google Fit, it would have to interact directly with each of those apps. In this case, you just need to connect to Health Connect and Health Connect will handle all those connections.
Health Connect was announced at Google I/O and recently opened to users on the Google Play store. It consists of an SDK that developers can embed in their apps, and a user-facing application that controls permissions and data management.
What apps support Health Connect?
Health Connect is still in beta, but A growing list of apps that support the APIBelow is a list of all apps that support Health Connect at the time of writing.
- Healthify Me
- fit bit
- samsung health
- Google Fit
- my fitness pal
- Oura
- flow
- lifesum
- outdoor active
- Proof Insight
Some apps support the Health Connect API Must comply with strict data rules For the handling and processing of personal user data.
How does Health Connect work?
Health Connect works by creating a single SDK that health apps need to connect to, rather than sharing that data with independently supported applications. Apps that support Health Connect can understand data collected from other apps they choose to collect, as long as they are granted permission to share and read the data through the Health Connect API.
It’s very easy to understand how the API works thanks to Google’s own documentation on Google I/O.
As you can see in the diagram above (excerpted from Google’s introduction to Health Connect at Google I/O), an app that collects data works with Health Connect to collect all data shared between other apps on a user’s phone. Gives you control over permissions and data. This can be done, for example, by using an app that specializes in sleep tracking, another app that specializes in workout training, and then holistically combining that data in another third app to get all It means that you can get an overview of your vitals. It is not something that exists yet, but what could not exist before can now exist.
for example, According to MyFitnessPal We are currently synchronizing the following information for other apps to read and process:
- calorie consumption
- procedure
- Cardio
- water consumption
For example, for cardio, enter it in the app and MyFitnessPal will share your cardio with Health Connect. When you enter your cardio into another app, that data is shared from Health Connect to MyFitnessPal. All data is stored locally with respect to Health Connect. After that, it’s up to your app to use the SDK to handle the data.
When can I use Health Connect?
Health Connect is already available to users and can be used with any of the above supported applications. It’s currently in beta, but it’s already working pretty well, although Google seems to be aiming to pre-install Health Connect on his Android devices. Android 14according to Recent reports from PsychicsGoogle has already said it will come pre-installed on some Android devices, and with Android 13 QPR2 on the Google Pixel, Google included the Health Connect stub package.
as explained in Psychics, Commits found in AOSP Gerrit Health Connect is main line of the project module. This is backed up by the fact that Googler showed “com.android.healthconnect” as his APEX module (the format used in mainline) in his system_server. It’s still unclear how Google will incorporate Health Connect into his Android versions in the future, but it seems likely that it will be incorporated into Android 14 in some way.
