Google introduces platform for fitness apps

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Google has announced Google Fit: an open platform for developers to more easily build fitness apps. According to the official blog post, Google Fit provides a single set of APIs for apps and device manufacturers to store and access activity data from fitness apps and sensors on Android and other devices (like wearables, heart rate monitors or connected scales).

This means that with the user’s permission, developers can get access to the user’s fitness history – enabling developers to provide more interesting features like personalized coaching, better insights, fitness recommendations and more.

There are three sets of APIs designed to meet specific developer needs:

• Sensors API provides high-level access to sensors from the device and wearables – so with one API your app can talk to sensors, whether on an Android device or a wearable. If you’re making a running app, you could register it to receive updates from a connected heart rate monitor every 5 seconds during a user’s run and give immediate feedback to the runner on the display.
• Recording API allows apps to register for battery-efficient, cloud-synced background collection of fitness data. For example, a running app could ask to store user’s location so it can map the run later. Once it registers for these data types, collection is done by Fit in the background with no further work needed by the app.
• History API allows operations on the data like read, insert and delete. When the exerciser finishes his/her run, the running app can query the History API for all locations during the run and show a map.

For further information, please visit https://developers.google.com/fit/