Google took the I/O stage on Wednesday to unveil its new health and fitness tracking service called Fit in reply to Apple's Healthbook.
Health and Fitness tracking is slowly becoming a core function on mobile computing platform. After Apple showed off its Healthbook in iOS8 last month, Google announced its own fitness tracking platform, Fit, at the I/O Developers Conference in San Francisco, Wednesday. The new platform solely focuses on users' fitness needs and goals.
Google Fit is an open platform that is available for developers and allows apps to share health data using sensors on mobile devices and a wide range of wearable devices. The internet search titan has partnered with Nike+, LF, Adidas, Basis, Runtastic, RunKeeper, Polar, HTC and Motorola for its new initiative, making it compatible with series of devices and apps, Mashable reports.
Though, Google has not launched its own app like Apple did with Healthbook, it is expected the company will take an open-source approach in building its new platform based on APIs. This allows companies like Nike, Adidas and others to retrieve data from multiple sources and offer more comprehensive apps.
The Google Fit platform will be tightly paired with Android Wear, a platform built for wearable devices such as fitness bands and smartwatches.
At the I/O keynote, Google also demonstrated a fitness app from Noom. The app showed the number of steps taken, record of meals consumed, and even weight from a Withings scale. This showed that the apps can incorporate data from other apps and devices and give a complete health chart in one place, Greenbot reports.
Google is not stepping in the health game for the first time with Fit platform. The web giant shut down its Google Health platform in 2012, even before the project took off. Google Fit will also be seen as a great platform for third party companies like Samsung to modify its open-source codes and replace with something of its own. Samsung has already been working on its own health platform called Sami and unveiled a prototype version of health-tracking wristband, Simband, last month.
As for Google Fit, the platform SDK will go live in the coming weeks.
