Fitness is a big thing these days, and judging by the plethora of trackers on or entering the market there’s a reason that large companies like Samsung, Apple and now Google are launching Health tracking functions for their mobile devices.
According to a report from Forbes the service will launch at Google I/O later this month as a direct response to Apple’s Healthkit and Samsung’s Sami, although technically it’s probably been in development for around the same amount of time, but only being revealed at their developer conference.
The Google Fit service will consist of aggregated data collected through open APIs, these open APIs will be taken advantage of by partners who will be announced at Google I/O. The Google Fit service collect data such as step count, heart-rate monitoring and tie-in with Google’s cloud-based storage.
Whether ‘Google Fit’ will be built into the base Android OS or be released as a standalone App, or even sent out as an update through Google Play Services is unclear.
Wearables are hot right now and with the launch of Android Wear, which is said to have fitness tracking functions, a Google Fit service makes a lot of sense. With Google’s usual approach to trying to keep things open, Google Fit may be a step in the right direction for fitness wearables which have traditionally held your data to ransom, it would be great to be able to transfer to other wearables and maintain a connection to your fitness history.
Guess we’ll find out more at Google I/O.
My guess is that unlike iOS and HealthKit this will also work on iOS and possibly Windows Phone too.