This is just shutting down an already outdated API.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.”
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.
Dang, I just got a heart monitor that synced to Google fit to get my target heart points tracked…
If it uses health connect to send the data it’s still all good. And if you bought something recently made, it should.
Just to be clear - it’s the API that’s shutting down, not the app. Not that Google has put in effort for the app either, it hasn’t updated since health connect afaik, but health connect is the health and fitness tooling going forward.
Fitbit has health connect support now, so even if they shift and drop Fit (I hope not, though I also hoped they wouldn’t kill the web interface), and make Fitbit the main Google fitness app, it will still work with Fitbit as the app.
Health Connect “beta” is a battery hog. Until they fix those issues, it’s a non-starter for anyone caring about battery life.
Not really the question I was answering, but that’s not actually a health connect problem.
Withings had an issue, and the way they were connecting to it, which caused a battery drain. To be specific, withings health mate was constantly reading health connect data, which caused a massive power drain.
I’m not aware of any other battery issues with health connect other than Withings and their Health Mate app (specifically reading, not writing).
(Edit: why, why would autocorrect change writing to riding? For shame. To me, for not noticing sooner.)
RIP again my Pebble
Yes, and in that state it’s still better than any other smart watch I’ve tried. By a lot, too. Which is honestly just sad, but here we are…
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.
yes but until possible i like to have the working weather on my watchface and gadgetbridge is very opinionated against that as it could be used for user tracking, so any kind of internet access is blocked
GadgetBridge is not really against supporting online-only functions, it just can’t be part of the main app. Weather Providers is what you’re looking for.
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
We have a winner! Employees are rewarded for starting new influential projects, not maintaining or improving existing ones. Thus, there’s intense pressure to propose new products and shut down the old one to beef out the performance reviews.
Hence, Google can almost never take a product from concept to maturity because it hurts the people working on the project to do so.
