Google Fit APIs get shut down in 2025, might break fitness devices

The story summarised: they entered the market rapidly as a me too proposition after seeing apple’s HealthKit, did a crap job of it, decided to start again and pissed off everyone in the process.<p>Whereas Apple have managed to produce devices, a whole portfolio of tools and integrations and even down to training videos and fitness programmes…

If I&#x27;m not mistaken, this might be just about the best Killed By Google ever?<p>Google Fit is a health data service offered by Google, with all of the health data stored under your Google account on Google&#x27;s servers. Its API is also the defacto means of interchange on the Android platform, so if you want the measurements of your smart scales on App A to sync over to your calorie counting App B (assuming the two services don&#x27;t have their own direct integration), you would hand over your measurements to Google&#x27;s Fit service and then have the other app read it from Google.<p>If I understand this correctly, Health Connect is a device-local API. App A saves the measurement to this local data store on your phone, and App B reads from that, without your measurements ever hitting Google&#x27;s servers?<p>That seems much better.

Seems like they&#x27;re moving everyone to health connect? it is automatically installed on my Pixel. The UI is very different, doesn&#x27;t even have a dashboard, I can&#x27;t see my sleep and any of my data as well only what I shared to other app. Also weirdly when I go to play store, it says installed, but I can&#x27;t search it on the list of app?<p>What&#x27;s with the decision to move to another app anyway? The only thing that they should do is literally nothing.

Google just doesn&#x27;t have the attention span required for this sort of thing. I was around at Google when Larry Page was pushing the &quot;more wood, fewer arrows&quot; mantra but it never translated to organizational or cultural change.<p>Some things work very well when they&#x27;re bottom-up or engineering focused (eg search, GMail). Others require top-down leadership to create a coherent product and user experience (eg an operating system). So Google has built some amazing technology but hasn&#x27;t been great at things that require polish. Apple OTOH has been very good at producing a consistent user experience.<p>Apple can push through things in a way Google can&#x27;t because Google engineers are incentivized to write something new or rewrite something for &quot;impact&quot; to get promoted and then you move on to the next hot thing. Apple Pay is a great example of what Apple is good at. They just keep plugging away. Every week there&#x27;s another bank in some minor country that signs on and over the years they&#x27;ve built an ecosystem. Google doesn&#x27;t have that kind of patience.<p>Likewise with the Apple Watch. It was originally launched as a &quot;luxury&quot; product, mainly due to a bad executive hire (IMHO) ie Angela Ahrendts. It&#x27;s found a niche (but still not mass market appeal) as a health and fitness device.<p>APIs are forever. You have to be extremely careful about what you release into the wild. Once something hits production, you&#x27;ve made a commitment. There are only so many times you can burn your platform users.<p>Another example I came across recently was with Nest. There&#x27;s another Google product (because of course there is) called Google Matter for integration into, say, Amazon or Apple&#x27;s smart device ecosystems. But guess what? The Nest Learning Themostat isn&#x27;t compatible and won&#x27;t be migrated. Because reasons. And this was a device that they were selling last year. That&#x27;s just unacceptable.<p>Remember the debacle with Linux support for Google Drive?<p>Anyway, fitness devices are still a relatively small market and Apple have consumed a lot of the oxygen. This market just isn&#x27;t big enough for Google to really care about. Google Fit was probably someone&#x27;s E6-&gt;E7 project and they&#x27;re long gone now.

Ouch. Is this going to give our developers another unnecessary workload as we have to update our apps and integrations? Is there at least somewhere I can read about the benefits of switching to Health Connect?

For this reason, I have no interest in investing my data and time in Google&#x27;s consumer products.

Will the replacement API work with all google account types? I have had to switch from fitbit to garmin, because new fitbit devices <i>require</i> a google account, but apparently my google account isn’t good enough (I signed up to their business suite thing because I wanted to use gmail with my own domain name, only for business accounts to be deprecated with no migration path...)

Discussion from 2 days ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40262082">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40262082</a>

At what point will the dev community stop seeing any Google product as fit for purpose? I&#x27;ve personally been bitten with their services getting killed, seemingly at random.

I&#x27;d love to see the conclusions that lead to these shutdowns.

Google doing Google things<p>I&#x27;m gonna start the degoogling of my life asap.

As someone who does a lot of fitness, I&#x27;m pretty happy in the Garmin ecosystem.

Honestly the more of these shutdowns I see over the years, the more I come to the conclusion that if you&#x27;re relying on Google for anything that isn&#x27;t Search, GMail or YouTube, you might as well consider that to be volatile data and you should look into alternatives (and then watch out that Google doesn&#x27;t suddenly choose to acquire them). I can selfhost (and know enough about my tech stacks to unshittify a broken installation) but that&#x27;s obviously not a solution for everyone and there&#x27;s an increased standards capture going on with Big Tech to make that harder and harder these days.<p>GMail and YouTube are solely exempt because of some faint hope of government intervention if Google&#x27;s internal brain bleed ever decides to kill those off. Which isn&#x27;t a great thing to bet on. (Search is exempt because it&#x27;s literally the main reason they&#x27;re so massive.)

[dupe]<p>Some more discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40262082">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40262082</a>

this is good news to be honest, as someone who has been using the Google Fit API, it has been an excruciating experience due to security checks they imposed. Having a simplified process to use that API, is something I can only welcome.

So the REST API has no replacement?

Why does anyone ever give Google money for anything at this point?