12 ms·
Google Fit APIs get shut down in 2025, might break fitness devices
- paultopia 2y agoWhy does anyone ever give Google money for anything at this point?
- fidotron 2y agoMore like their time and energy. Provisionally free, but not worth it in the end. Arguably Google not charging actual end users for services up front is the root of this problem.
- partitioned 2y ago[flagged]
- DC-3 2y agoMost people have better things to do with their time than maintain mental lists of which technology companies have better and worse track records for product maintenance and support.
- rickspencer3 2y agoI pay for ad-free YouTube. I also pay for a ton of extra storage in Google drive. I find the constantly closing down and shifting of services to be a slight annoyance but not really too impactful in my personal usage. For example, moving Google podcasts and YouTube music into YouTube has been a pretty sad degradation. But not really a deal breaker for me. What I would never ever do is build a business on top of Google. They seem so cavalier about pulling the rug out from under you. I can only imagine if you have for example services running in Google cloud, how they would treat you if you were counting on a service that they thought wasn't worth it to maintain anymore. Shutting down apis that people were using like this just seems very on-brand for them to me.
- prmoustache 2y agoBuilding any non super short term business on top of a unique, non interchangeable third party service is always a bad decision anyway.
- ta1243 2y agoYet this entire site is based around building stuff on AWS services which push lockin
- rickspencer3 2y agoI would argue that there are good business to be built on top of AWS and Azure catering to the users of those services, and very little chance that Amazon or Microsoft would pull the rug out from under you based on their track records.
- eknkc 2y agoI happily pay for YouTube Premium. I'm unhappy that I'm paying for Gsuite (or whatever it is called these days). I don't think there is a way to downgrade your account tied to your own domain to a free google account? If there is, I'll def do that and. I already use Fastmail anyway but there are too many stuff tied to my Google account (logins, google drive data etc)
- prmoustache 2y agoGoogle drive data is probably the easiest part to get out. I found out it was much more annoying to do the same for google photos. My partner created a tons of albums and last time I had a look at the google export you'd have to build your own parser to scrap the metadata and rebuild the albums locally. I wonder if someone already build this.
- vishnumohandas 2y agoThis might help: https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper
- prmoustache 2y agoThis is useful thanks although the goal of this tool is to put all photos in chronologically ordered folders. It doesn't seem to yet be able to recreate albums either by using folders and symlinks or (preferrably) adding tags in the exif metadata. I'll give it a try with takeout again.
- agilob 2y agoI bought a fitbit, and now it's Google.
- shaan7 2y agoFor me it is to store encrypted backups of TBs of data on Google Drive. Simply because its the cheapest option (although its slow AF). I'd like to switch to something else if either the competition lowers prices or I make more monies :P
- blacklion 2y agoIsn't B2 cheaper for big volumes of data?
- shaan7 2y agoI am using 2TB for now. Google One annual is €99.99/year while B2 would cost $6x2x12=$144 ~= €134 . Even for 5TB Google is cheaper. Unless B2 have an option for annual pricing and its not obvious from the pricing page.
- blacklion 2y agoAh, Ok, fair enough. For me "TBs" starts at 10TB :-) But, yes, even 2TB is terabytes, of course. My bad.
- digikazi 2y agoIn my case, out of nostalgia for the Google of old. I paid for a Pixel phone and was very unimpressed with the experience, so much so that after a lifetime on Android I went and bought a brand new iDevice. Oddly enough I found Google Fit to be a nice app to use, fairly straightforward and without too much crud. Oh well, off to the Goog Graveyard it goes!
- okokwhatever 2y agoGoogle doing Google things I'm gonna start the degoogling of my life asap.
- valevk 2y agoSwitched to proton, never looked back
- girvo 2y agoFastmail for me, but yeah same. I did that a long time ago -- the only thing I use still is search and youtube. The latter of which has no real replacement sadly
- yashasolutions 2y agoKagi is a great replacement for search. Agree about Youtube having no replacement for now.
- teekert 2y ago99% of my searches are on DDG and it's my default browser (on iOS), I'm pretty happy with it.
- Zambyte 2y agoI also use Kagi and I really enjoy it (enough to pay for the ultimate subscription), but it's hard for me to recommend to someone wanting to "degoogle" their life. Kagi search results depend (probably a lot) on the Google search API. If Google rug pulled that, Kagi search results would definitely be effected.
- solardev 2y agoWhat do you do for calendar? Docs? Files? Maps? Photos?
- prmoustache 2y ago
- filcuk 2y agoI'd love to see the conclusions that lead to these shutdowns.
- macspoofing 2y agoPer the article, they have 3 different Fitness/Health APIs. Having no cohesive corporate strategy around initiatives like this, and instead letting individual departments chart their course, leading to confusion, duplicated work, and diffusion of focus, is very typical of Google.
- yreg 2y agoThey help with someone's KPIs, OKRs or some other unhelpful BS.
- dariosalvi78 2y agoGoogle Fit APIs were a security hell. Being cloud based, they required a pretty horrible approval process I recommend nobody to go through. The new model is more similar to Apple's: all is local, user is responsible for accepting/rejecting data sharing.
- makeitdouble 2y agoDiscussion from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40262082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40262082
- robertwt7 2y agoSeems like they're moving everyone to health connect? it is automatically installed on my Pixel. The UI is very different, doesn't even have a dashboard, I can't see my sleep and any of my data as well only what I shared to other app. Also weirdly when I go to play store, it says installed, but I can't search it on the list of app? What's with the decision to move to another app anyway? The only thing that they should do is literally nothing.
- romwell 2y ago>What's with the decision to move to another app anyway? Someone gets promoted for launching and making "impact". >The only thing that they should do is literally nothing. That's not "making impact". You can't get promoted for that. In fact, that's how you become a Xoogler.
- dariosalvi78 2y agoHealth Connect is to Google Fit like HealthKit is to Health app. Health Connect is just the database basically. Fit is one of the many apps that will use Health Connect.
- rlupi 2y agoIt could be to avoid regulatory pressure. The tide is changing and this could be a preventive move. If you just provide a database, you don't compete with Health apps.
- guzik 2y agoOuch. Is this going to give our developers another unnecessary workload as we have to update our apps and integrations? Is there at least somewhere I can read about the benefits of switching to Health Connect?
- nvahalik 2y agoYes. Especially since health connect will require you to update your minimum targets!
- oliwarner 2y agoUser privacy. Keeps the data on the phone. Speed. Fit warehoused and brokered data centrally via OAuth which is far slower a local-local system API integration. https://developer.android.com/health-and-fitness/guides/health-connect/develop/frequently-asked-questions https://developer.android.com/health-and-fitness/guides/heal... I think this is a much better design for this perimedical data, but it's absolutely going to be harder to do some things now you have to interact directly with a device API.
- g105b 2y agoAt what point will the dev community stop seeing any Google product as fit for purpose? I've personally been bitten with their services getting killed, seemingly at random.
- romwell 2y ago>At what point will the dev community stop seeing any Google product as fit for purpose? But that one was really called Fit! Surely it would be fit for that purpose! Oh well. It's the deprecation of the fittest at the Google Graveyard. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- vouaobrasil 2y agoI doubt they will, as long as we have a culture of disposable products everywhere. Google is the one-time use plastic bag of the software world.
- cjk2 2y agoThe story summarised: they entered the market rapidly as a me too proposition after seeing apple’s HealthKit, did a crap job of it, decided to start again and pissed off everyone in the process. Whereas Apple have managed to produce devices, a whole portfolio of tools and integrations and even down to training videos and fitness programmes…
- lloydatkinson 2y agoI think Google is ideologically incapable of anything new. This is proved by countless “killed by Google” incidents.
- MawKKe 2y agoCreate value for shareholders vs. create value for customers
- praxulus 2y agoHow is this creating value for shareholders? They wasted a bunch of engineer and pm salaries building useless products that never made (and now never will make) any significant money.
- jellicle 2y agoBut that's not how shareholder value is created. Shareholder value is created by press releases and hype, encouraging new people to buy the stock and drive up the price, not by building anything useful to society or long-term profitable. So if Google Fit drove a hype cycle, it was successful.
- hollerith 2y agoYes, and that is why stock in pets.com is so valuable and why Segway, Inc, sold for so much money when it sold.
- 2y ago
- schappim 2y agoFor this reason, I have no interest in investing my data and time in Google's consumer products.
- guardian5x 2y agoAs someone who does a lot of fitness, I'm pretty happy in the Garmin ecosystem.
- blacklion 2y agoEcosystem, which don't allow me to download track from my watches to smartphone when I don't have internet access... I don't say, that Google is better, but Garmin is not so good :-(
- denismi 2y agoIf I'm not mistaken, this might be just about the best Killed By Google ever? Google Fit is a health data service offered by Google, with all of the health data stored under your Google account on Google's servers. Its API is also the defacto means of interchange on the Android platform, so if you want the measurements of your smart scales on App A to sync over to your calorie counting App B (assuming the two services don't have their own direct integration), you would hand over your measurements to Google's Fit service and then have the other app read it from Google. If I understand this correctly, Health Connect is a device-local API. App A saves the measurement to this local data store on your phone, and App B reads from that, without your measurements ever hitting Google's servers? That seems much better.
- naasking 2y agoWhat if you change or lose your phone?
- pmontra 2y agoDaily encrypted backup to Google Drive, like WhatsApp?
- datadrivenangel 2y agoLocal-first with cloud backup. Customer wins because everything can be local and you can extract it all, google/apple also wins because they get convenience style lock-in effects while being able to say that it's not lock-in.
- naasking 2y agoI wish there was a simple and cheap off the shelf home server that could do this for laypeople, and backup photos etc. without relying on Google or Apple, but it doesn't really exist. Synology and QNAP and such get close, but they're still pricey and their backup options are limited. I've had Synology, and the big problem there was that each upgrade erased my photo database and albums and invalidated all of the links I sent out. It's pointless to rely on these.
- cletus 2y agoGoogle just doesn't have the attention span required for this sort of thing. I was around at Google when Larry Page was pushing the "more wood, fewer arrows" mantra but it never translated to organizational or cultural change. Some things work very well when they're bottom-up or engineering focused (eg search, GMail). Others require top-down leadership to create a coherent product and user experience (eg an operating system). So Google has built some amazing technology but hasn't been great at things that require polish. Apple OTOH has been very good at producing a consistent user experience. Apple can push through things in a way Google can't because Google engineers are incentivized to write something new or rewrite something for "impact" to get promoted and then you move on to the next hot thing. Apple Pay is a great example of what Apple is good at. They just keep plugging away. Every week there's another bank in some minor country that signs on and over the years they've built an ecosystem. Google doesn't have that kind of patience. Likewise with the Apple Watch. It was originally launched as a "luxury" product, mainly due to a bad executive hire (IMHO) ie Angela Ahrendts. It's found a niche (but still not mass market appeal) as a health and fitness device. APIs are forever. You have to be extremely careful about what you release into the wild. Once something hits production, you've made a commitment. There are only so many times you can burn your platform users. Another example I came across recently was with Nest. There's another Google product (because of course there is) called Google Matter for integration into, say, Amazon or Apple's smart device ecosystems. But guess what? The Nest Learning Themostat isn't compatible and won't be migrated. Because reasons. And this was a device that they were selling last year. That's just unacceptable. Remember the debacle with Linux support for Google Drive? Anyway, fitness devices are still a relatively small market and Apple have consumed a lot of the oxygen. This market just isn't big enough for Google to really care about. Google Fit was probably someone's E6->E7 project and they're long gone now.
- JohnBooty 2y agoLikewise with the Apple Watch. It was originally launched as a "luxury" product, There was a luxury gold version. The rest were priced at mainstream smartwatch prices. It's found a niche (but still not mass market appeal) as a health and fitness device. Niche? Where do you reside? Greater than 50% market share and > 50 million units sold per year. Anecdotally, they're common to see here in the suburbs of a major American city. (FWIW, I personally am not a fan of smartwatches and don't own one, so it's not like I'm exactly defending them. Just genuinely puzzled by your take...) https://www.statista.com/statistics/1421546/apple-watch-sales-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1421546/apple-watch-sale...
- Shish2k 2y agoWill the replacement API work with all google account types? I have had to switch from fitbit to garmin, because new fitbit devices require a google account, but apparently my google account isn’t good enough (I signed up to their business suite thing because I wanted to use gmail with my own domain name, only for business accounts to be deprecated with no migration path...)
- noirscape 2y agoHonestly the more of these shutdowns I see over the years, the more I come to the conclusion that if you're relying on Google for anything that isn't Search, GMail or YouTube, you might as well consider that to be volatile data and you should look into alternatives (and then watch out that Google doesn't suddenly choose to acquire them). I can selfhost (and know enough about my tech stacks to unshittify a broken installation) but that's obviously not a solution for everyone and there's an increased standards capture going on with Big Tech to make that harder and harder these days. GMail and YouTube are solely exempt because of some faint hope of government intervention if Google's internal brain bleed ever decides to kill those off. Which isn't a great thing to bet on. (Search is exempt because it's literally the main reason they're so massive.)
- CyberDogFK 2y agoGoogle start searching a way to AI that can search links at internet and give you info immediately and how to integrate at those answers add. So, we can be pretty sure, when they found how to do this - Search will be deprecated too.
- dariosalvi78 2y agothis is good news to be honest, as someone who has been using the Google Fit API, it has been an excruciating experience due to security checks they imposed. Having a simplified process to use that API, is something I can only welcome.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40262082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40262082
- curt15 2y agoSo the REST API has no replacement?