Google Fit dev APIs shutdown set, fate of Android & Wear OS apps go unannounced
Earlier this week, the company detailed how the "Google Fit APIs have been deprecated" and that the shutdown is set for June 30, 2025.
This is just shutting down an already outdated API. Devs should be moving off of it, and now it has a year out set for full removal instead of just being deprecated.
But in typical Google fashion, the replacement is inferior and doesn't have the same features
However, there is no replacement for the Goals API that lets Google Fit users set “how many steps and heart points they want to aim for each day.”
Come on now, that's not just a Google problem and you know it, no need to shit on Google for something damn near every tech company does. Google does their fair share of shitty things, this isn't really one of them.
Health connect doesn't set your step count goals, because what it does in the back end (because that's what it is, the back end API) is set a way to read and write that data.
The front end, Google Fit, also connects to health connect on the back end. And the Fit app is not given a shutdown here, just the API it also uses in the back end.
I suspect Google will stop developing Fit, as they kind of already have. However, all these varieties of other apps out there (Fitbit, Withings Health Mate, Samsung Health, MyFitnessPal, etc) can use health connect data, and do allow you to set goals. They use the same data, and now are more interoperable with Health Connect than they were with the Fit API.
If it's not killed by google, it's replaced with a crappier version. Having developed against many Google APIs, "deprecation" is a very frequent word they use. Most of the time there is no stated reason why an API had to be deprecated, just that it is being deprecated. They also give minimal time to switch over, the worst one I had was PubSub's API having a mandated migration we had to perform - in under 3 weeks. Very difficult for an already tasked team of engineers who had a mountain of other more pressing work. Why I actively push against working on GCP, or google products at all. I've successfully pushed 2 companies away from using Google cloud now.
Microsoft, as an example of the opposite, will have years long deprecation strategies, and usually go overboard with making sure engineers have a good replacement, and documentation on how to migrate. They have a lot to be hated for, but damn are they good with managing downstream engineers.
Yes, worst clickbait title I've seen in a while. Health Connect was announced 2 years ago...
Dang, I just got a heart monitor that synced to Google fit to get my target heart points tracked...
RIP again my Pebble
Not sure if you know, but there is an app called gadgetbridge, open source that can interface with many wearable devices including pebble. I use it with an amazfit bip and it works very well. You should give it a try.
I don't understand why people still put time and effort into creating or buying stuff for this foremostly marketing company.
Everyone here seems to be about privacy and hating ads, yet still funneling time, effort, and money to them 🙃
This is why they bought Fitbit, right?
The Fitbit app still doesn't cover everything Google Fit does. As is tradition. I can't believe I bought another device.
At this point I'm guessing there's some internal rule that every once in a while forces them to replace products with inferior, incomplete alternatives written from scratch, and only reach feature parity 3-4 years after the shutdown, when everyone gave up and found an alternative.
The rules apparently states that in order to maximize confusion it must be a similar but different name, that users don't have a guided migration and that the app must be separately downloaded. It's extremely forbidden to just update the existing app
Any recommendations for an automatic step counter?
