If you’ve ever used multiple health and fitness tracking apps on your smartphone, you’ll know the pain of tracking across multiple apps with seemingly no interconnection. Apps like MyFitnessPal will sometimes be able to interact 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 does support Google Fit, so you can connect Mi Fit to Google Fit and then Google Fit to MyFitnessPal. It’s a nightmare for anyone who uses multiple apps, but Google has a solution: Health Connect.
There are countless health tracking apps on Android, but not every single app will cover every vital thing you might want to track. Apps can choose to share data individually with other apps, but previously there wasn’t One Application Programming Interface (API) that health apps can leverage to share data. Health Connect is Google’s answer to the problem, acting as an intermediary for these tracking apps to share data with each other. If MyFitnessPal wanted to take data from Samsung Health, Fitbit, and Google Fit, it previously needed to interact directly with each of these apps. In this case, he just needs to connect to Health Connect, and Health Connect will handle all those connections for him.
Health Connect was announced at Google I/O and recently released to users on the Google Play Store. It consists of an SDK that developers can integrate into their apps and a user-facing application that controls permissions and data management.
What apps support Health Connect?
Health Connect is still in beta, however There is a slowly growing list of applications that support the API. The list below is a list of all the apps that support Health Connect at the time of writing.
- Healthify Me
- Fitbit
- Samsung Health
- Google Fit
- MyFitnessPal
- aura
- Flo
- livesum
- in the fresh air
- Proof Insight
Apps that also support the Health Connect API Must comply with strict databases To deal with and process 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 individually supported apps. Any app that supports Health Connect can understand data collected from any other apps it chooses to collect, as long as those apps have been given permission to share and read the data through the Health Connect API.
Understanding how the API works is fairly simple thanks to Google’s own documentation at Google I/O.
According to the above diagram (taken from Google’s introduction of the Health Connect app at Google I/O), apps that collect data can interact with Health Connect and allow it to control all permissions and data shared across other apps on a user’s phone. This means that you can use an app that specializes in tracking sleep, for example, and another app that specializes in exercise training, and then combine that data in a comprehensive way into another third app that gives you an overview of all your vitals. It is not something that exists yet, but something that can exist now that did not previously exist.
for example, MyFitnessPal says It is currently synchronizing the following information so that other applications can read and process it as well:
- Calorie consumption
- steps
- the heart
- water consumption
For example, in the case of cardio, MyFitnessPal will share your cardio workout with Health Connect if you enter it into the app. If you enter a cardio workout into another app, that data is shared from Health Connect to MyFitnessPal. All data is stored locally for Health Connect, and it’s up to apps that use the SDK what to do with the data next.
When can I use Health Connect?
Health Connect is already available for users, and you can use it with any of the supported apps above. It’s in beta right now though it works really well, it looks like Google is aiming to pre-install Health Connect on Android devices, possibly as soon as possible on Android 14, according to A recent report from Asper. Google has already said that it will come pre-installed on some Android devices, and with Android 13 QPR2 on Google Pixels, Google has included the Health Connect bundle.
As explained Aspera Commit spotted on AOSP Gerrit It is suggested that Health Connect can be converted into a Project Mainline unit. This is supported by the fact that a Google employee showed “com.android.healthconnect” as an APEX module (format used by Mainline) in system_server. It’s up in the air exactly how Google Health Connect will be integrated into a future Android version, but it looks like we’ll see it included in Android 14 in some way.
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