Google Fit Aims To Be Your Main Source Of Health Data

We had heard a few weeks back that Google would unveil its new fitness platform at the I/O 2014 conference. It didn’t let us down. Merely a short time after Apple unveiled a similar platform called Healthkit at WWDC 2014 the Mountain View company today announced Google Fit. Some of us use multiple applications to keep track of our health and fitness, be it an app that measures steps or one that teaches us workouts. The platform aims to bring all of that information from all of those different applications into one single place where they can easily share it between themselves without requiring you to manually enter it.

The Google Fit platform is essentially a single set of APIs that developers can use to create applications which share health and fitness related data with each other. The feature itself will be opt-in, so by default your data won’t be shared across applications unless you specifically give them permission to do so. It also becomes easier for you, the user, to analyze data collected by all of the different applications.

Google really stresses the point of apps being restricted in data sharing until permission is given by the user. You decide what you share with what apps and you always have the ability to delete data whenever you want.

Moreover it also opens up the Android platform as a whole to data collected from hardware from other manufacturers. For example a handful of sensors from Adidas would work with Google Fit, and even Nike’s going to open its apps to integrate Nike Fuel with Fit.

Developers will get access to the platform in the coming weeks and they’ll be able to play with it and create their own solutions. End users will have to wait until the next major Android release ships.