Almost every major health and fitness category is covered, including activity, sleep, nutrition, body measurements, and vital statistics like blood pressure and heart rate. Users have full control over which categories of data are aggregated and which aren’t, and everything is stored locally on their devices (rather than in the cloud) and encrypted for added security.
Using Google Health Connect
Install the beta Health Connect app on your Android phone, open it, and you can start deciding which of your fitness and wellness apps are allowed to interface with it. Health Connect is not an app in the traditional sense and will not appear in the Android app drawer; you can open it from its Play Store page: Applications: In Settings or from the Quick Settings panel.
On the Health Connect home screen, you’ll be able to see apps that have recently used the service. Tap App permissions to choose which applications can and cannot use Health Connect; the contents of the list you see will vary depending on the applications installed on your phone. If you want the app to provide some data (such as steps) but not other data (such as heart rate), you can also configure this here.
You can see a list of all the apps that currently work with Health Connect here. At the time of writing, the list includes MyFitnessPal, Peloton, Oura (makers of the Oura smart band), and WeightWatchers, as well as the aforementioned Google Fit, Samsung Health, and Fitbit. It’s not the most comprehensive list, but it’s early days for Health Connect and the service is still in beta. There are also some apps like Sleep as Android that have added Health Connect support but are not on the official list.
To return to the Health Connect home screen, select Data and access to manage your data. You’ll see the categories for which data is collected, and there’s an option to delete collected data or have it automatically deleted on a schedule (for example, when it’s older than six months). Dive into a specific category to delete specific batches of data; You can also check which apps have access to that category, and choose which app should be treated as priority in cases where a data type (such as steps) is being recorded by multiple apps at the same time.
As we said earlier, you can’t actually see your data in Health Connect, it just connects the dots. However, once you’ve adjusted your fitness streams as needed, you should be able to open your favorite apps (like Google Fit or Fitbit) and see everything in one place. Track which applications can read and write what types of data (from App permissions) to make sure there is one app where everything flows.
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