Google announced today that its Health Connect app is now available in beta on the Play Store. Health Connect is designed to centralize access to health and fitness data from various eligible apps. Today, more than 10 health and fitness apps are launching integrations with Health Connect, including MyFitnessPal, Oura and Peloton.
The app syncs health and fitness data from eligible platforms and allows other apps to gain access to this data with their consent, while providing centralized privacy controls for users. Developers have previously had to establish multiple API connections to share data between different apps, which limited developers’ data sharing capabilities and made it hard for users to unlock this data for use in different apps.
With Health Connect, developers no longer have to build a whole new integration. Google says building an integration with a new app is as simple as reading in new data from Health Connect.
“For example, Android users will now be able to sync and get credit for their Peloton workouts in apps like Oura, MyFitnessPal, WeightWatchers and Lifesum,” Google said in a blog post. “Now, through a single integration with Health Connect, Peloton Members will have the option to share their workout stats across the ecosystem of apps they use to support their overall wellness.”
Google says Health Connect provides a standardized data schema that supports 40+ data types across six categories. The schema covers a wide range of use cases, from exercises to sleep tracking to vital signs.
The app not only simplifies app connectivity, but also give users more privacy controls by allowing them to monitor which apps have access to data. In the past, users have had to navigate to multiple apps to manage data permissions and developers had to build out permissions management UIs themselves. Health Connect allows users to manage permissions in a single place. As for developers, Health Connect provides the permissions management hub and granular permissions UIs out of the box.
Google collaborated with Samsung to build Health Connect with the goal of simplifying the connectivity between health and fitness apps. The company first unveiled the initiative earlier this year at its I/O developer conference.
Health Connect is available to download as a public beta via the Google Play Store starting today. Google hasn’t detailed its plans regarding a full public release. At launch, the app has integrations with Fitbit, Samsung Health, Google Fit, MyFitnessPal, Peloton, Oura, WeightWatchers, Flo, Lifesum, Signos, Tonal, Outdooractive and Proov Insight.
Source @TechCrunch
