Health Connect Integration Comes to Health and Fitness Apps on Android

Google announced today that over one dozen health and fitness apps on Android now support its Health Connect service for secure data sharing. Key among these apps are Google’s Fitbit and Google Fit, plus MyFitnessPal, Peloton, Oura, WeightWatchers, and several others.

“Health Connect is a way for app developers to have early access to a platform that securely shares health and fitness data across Android devices, with user consent,” Google’s Sara Hamilton writes in the announcement post. “We collaborated with Samsung to build this platform which simplifies the connectivity between your apps while providing centralized privacy controls for users. We are now making the Health Connect (Beta) app available for download in Google Play to give users a central place to manage their privacy settings with granular controls to see which apps have access to data at any given time.”

Health Connect lets compatible apps and services share health and fitness data with each other. “For example, Android users will now be able to sync and get credit for their Peloton workouts in apps like Oura, MyFitnessPal, WeightWatchers, and Lifesum,” Hamilton explains. “Now, through a single integration with Health Connect, Peloton Members will have the option to share their workout stats across the ecosystem of apps they use to support their overall wellness.”

Left unsaid is that this integration also makes it easier for users to leave a particular health and fitness platform and adopt another, since their data will move forward with them now. Health Connect supports syncing over 40 types of health and fitness data across 6 top-level categories, and it provides centralized privacy controls for users.