Google’s one-stop shop for fitness apps is now available: Details

Announcing the app’s availability via a blog post, Google said that Health Connect gives users a central place to manage their privacy settings with granular controls to see which apps have access to data at any given time. The tech giant has partnered with Samsung to build the Health Connect app that ‘simplifies the connectivity between your apps while providing centralized privacy controls for users’.

Early adopters of Health Connect include MyFitnessPal, Oura and Peloton apps. Google explains that Android users will now be able to sync and get credit for their Peloton workouts in apps like Oura, MyFitnessPal, WeightWatchers and Lifesum. Peloton Members will also have the option to share their workout stats across the ecosystem of apps they use to support their overall wellness. 

How does Health Connect app work? 

In the blog post, Google says that Health Connect provides a standardized data schema which supports 40+ data types across 6 categories. The schema covers a wide range of use cases, from exercises to sleep tracking to vital signs. Health Connect even supports complex aggregations so that you can completely customize your queries to your app’s use case.

Before Health Connect, developers had to establish multiple API connections to share data between different apps and each integration was costly to build and maintain. With the new Google app, various health and fitness apps can talk to each other and provide a user with better, more holistic health insights. 

What about privacy? 

Health Connect makes the process of managing data permissions across various fitness apps easier. With Health Connect, users can easily manage permissions in a single place, with granular controls to see which apps are accessing data at any given time.

For developers, the new app provides the permissions management hub and granular permissions UIs out of the box, unlike before when they had to build out permissions management UIs themselves.