Google Fit Preview SDK now available

August 07, 2014


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By Angana Ghosh, Product Manager, Google Fit

At Google I/O we announced Google Fit: an open platform for developers to more easily build fitness apps. Today we’re making a preview SDK available to developers so that you can start to build.

Google Fit provides a single set of APIs for apps and device manufacturers to store and access activity data from fitness apps and sensors on Android and other devices (like wearables, heart rate monitors or connected scales). This means that with the user’s permission, you can get access to the user’s fitness history -- enabling you to provide more interesting features in your app like personalized coaching, better insights, fitness recommendations and more.

There are three sets of APIs designed to meet specific developer needs:
  1. Sensors API provides high-level access to sensors from the device and wearables—so with one API your app can talk to sensors, whether on an Android device or a wearable. So if you’re making a running app, you could register it to receive updates from a connected heart rate monitor every 5 seconds during a user’s run and give immediate feedback to the runner on the display.
  2. Recording API allows apps to register for battery-efficient, cloud-synced background collection of fitness data. For example, a running app could ask to store user’s location so it can map the run later. Once it registers for these data types, collection is done by Fit in the background with no further work needed by the app.
  3. History API allows operations on the data like read, insert and delete. When the exerciser finishes her run, the running app can query the History API for all locations during the run and show a map.
To get started, download the updated version of Google Play services containing the Google Fit APIs for Android in the Android L Developer Preview Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 system images. Use the Android SDK Manager to download the Google Play services client labeled "Google Play services for Fit Preview". You can start developing today using local fitness history on the device — the cloud backend will be available soon. Join the Google Fit developer community on Google+ to discuss the Preview and ask questions. For additional resources and more information about Google Fit, check out the Google Fit developers site.

The preview SDK gives you the tools to start building your app. You’ll be able to launch your app later this year when we launch the full Google Fit SDK as part of Google Play services for handsets, Android Wear and also for the web. We’re excited to see what you can come up with to make fitness in a connected world better.

Angana Ghosh is a product manager for the Google Fit team.

Posted by Louis Gray, Googler