Google announced Google Fit, its developer platform for fitness apps, at Google I/O earlier this summer. The company just announced the availability of the preview SDK.
Now, developers can start creating all kinds of cool apps to help people improve their health via Android devices, as well as wearable, heart rate monitors, and connected scales. Google Fit gives developers one set of APIs for apps and device manufacturers to store and access activity data from these devices.
There are APIs for Sensors, Recording, and History.
Google explains, “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.”
“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,” Google continues. “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 use the new preview SDK, you’ll need to download the updated version of Google Play services, which features the Google Fit APIs for Android. You’ll be able to use the Android SDK Manager to download the client labeled “Google Play services for Fit Preview”.
A cloud back-end will be available soon, Google says. You’ll be able to launch apps later this year when the full SDK is launched as part of Google Play services for handsets, Android Wear, and the web.
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