The Google Fit APIs will no longer be available after June 30, 2025 | Hacker News Reader

The Google Fit APIs will no longer be available after June 30, 2025

developers.google.com

65 pointsedward78 comments

So they're replacing the Google Fit APIs with Health Connect (https://developer.android.com/health-and-fitness/guides/heal...) which claims to be based on a set of standards but I can't seem to find which. Can anybody shed light on this and the background behind this migration?

Edit: I found this article which does shed more light: https://www.medm.com/company/blog/2024/what-is-health-connec...

In short, according to this, Health Connect removes the dependency on a Google account and stores data locally.

It also looks like this has been deprecated since 2022, and was slated for shutdown in 2024 which has been moved to 2025.

I don't know from a developer perspective, but I already used this in some apps.

Basically if you have your "health device" (e.g. smartwatch, smart scale, ...) from manufacturer X which has an app, and you want to use a Tracking App Y (e.g. MyFitnessPal, Google Fit/Health, ...) and they both implement the Health Connect APIs, then you can setup a connection between those apps and toggle which stats they can exchange e.g. from the health device manufacturer your weight, your steps, your heartrate etc, and from the tracking app your meals you have logged and so on.

The last time I used this (has been a while) this was also integrated into the Android System Settings and was a relative "native" experience.

Yes, this is less like canning a product and more like embracing a better standard.

If this was Apple instead of Google, this would be celebrated as a positive step forward.

I guess it shows the importance of messaging and marketing (and reputation).

Really? I hear people complaining about the death of OpenCL (which Apple championed early on) a lot here, so I don't think that's universally true.

You've got it right. Health Connect is a full replacement and gives users more control. This is a win for users and not a "killed by Google" situation.

Has Google launched one successful new product in the last 10-15 years? Not acquired and polished it up, that they can usually do, but actually launched themselves.

Pixel and Gemini are those that I remember right now.

EDIT Android 1.0 was released on 2024-09-23 ;)

Gemini launch was a disaster and will probably never wash away the early bad taste

i got a pixel 9 and i've been trying gemini -- it's still not good (specially compared to claude).

Google Fiber?

They stopped rolling it out, if I recall. The org is on life support at this point.

It just became available in my area last month (and I've been pretty happy with it after recently switching). What makes you think it's stopped rolling out?

Wikipedia suggests that they stopped expanding in 2016, only resuming in 2022.

I hadn't heard about the resumption, and it is welcome news. I suspect however that many people, especially those outwith the United States, are in the same position of ignorance.

Though after ruining city streets, in a drastic utter failure of basic civil engineering, and then entirely exiting a city in disgrace [1] they've left a lot of doubt and mistrust in their continued expansion "efforts".

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/googl...

This isn’t true. Fiber is actively expanding in many markets.

Just announced expansion in Kansas https://fiber.google.com/blog/2024/08/gfiber-is-on-way-lawre...

Google Meet comes to mind. It probably won't go away any time soon and I quite like it

Isn't it rebranded hangouts?

Isn't that a rebranded Chat inside Google Mail?

> Has Google launched one successful new product in the last 10-15 years?

What exactly is considered a success here? That it lives on for at least a decade? More than N active users per month?

I think the reason they graveyard so many products is because their line of "successful" is much higher than what a scrappy startup would consider success. So even products with thousands of active users would be put to their death bed instead of iterated upon.

--- What exactly is considered a success here? ---

Begin still available?

Maybe the Pixel phone is a success story?

>being still available

So where can I buy the original Pixel, new, with warranty, and with the latest software? I can't, because new version have come out since, just like, for example, Google's chat applications have been "killed", but a new version has always been made

I think this is an unreasonable bar.

Pixel is a line of hardware products, and to stay competitive in Google's target market, new hardware releases are essentially necessary. Likewise the common thinking in the industry (correct or not, and most likely case-by-case) is that keeping production of older models up and running isn't viable. That's the same reason you can't get first-gen iPhones anymore.

With software, you have the benefit of not having to scrap the entire product at once -- you can keep the sites, domains, brand, whatever -- and because the vast majority of users on something like Hangouts used the official client, you could get away with arbitrary API and interface changes without losing (nearly as much) brand momentum.

> new hardware releases are essentially necessary

What is not necessary is to prevent users from using old hardware by closing the drivers and not giving the specs.

Is this really preventing users from using old hardware? Are old devices being bricked?

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see drivers getting open sourced when they're going out of support, but on its own, not doing so isn't preventing people from using old hardware in most cases.

In any case, in your opinion, does a successful hardware product have to open-source its drivers and specs at EOL? Is any other hardware product a failure by that metric?

> Are old devices being bricked?

They become very insecure without any possibility to fix that.

> does a successful hardware product have to open-source its drivers and specs at EOL?

Successful from the point of view of the consumer, yes.

Sure, but that sounds like an awful business strategy. I would imagine people who have been burned by google dropping support being less likely to use new google products in the future

Their whole business is AdWords.

Everything else is just icing / data harvesting.

Stadia comes to mind.

Photos is the only one that comes to mind for me. I think it launched 2015.

Wasn't it based on Picasa, which they acquired?

No, it was based on Google+ which was integrated with Picasa

Not sure it felt like an improvement from 2006's Picasa Web Albums at the time. Also was really only a rebrand of a cutdown version of 2011's G+

10-15 years? I would say Google Photos, Pixel, Meet, Phone based GPS maps.

Sorry man, GMaps on mobile is from 2007

I think they mean turn by turn navigation, which launched in late October 2009 and so barely fits in the 15 year window. You could say that it's a feature of Google Maps, but since it relied on maps that Google made instead of licensed map data, that feature was a much larger undertaking than the previous Google Maps product to that point.

A lot of it depends on how strictly you define "new". To a lot of consumers, it looks like internal churn / re-use of previous products:

Google Picasa -> Google Photos

Google Chat -> Google Hangouts -> Google Meet

Picasa -> Photos was actually a new thing, right? Photos is cloud-hosted while Picasa was a program you installed on your computer and had web-sharing abilities.

Google Talk was the original one, then transitioning to Hangouts, while Allo and Duo were created too (I supposed to compete with Apple's iMessage and FaceTime), which also died, and finally we got to today with Google Chat and Google Meet.

I still use Picasa on Windows, but its cloud features (uploading and mapping) don’t work anymore.

Waymo

Waymo is a separate entity under Alphabet Inc., it's not a "Google" product since their corporate restructuring.

Google itself, as the internet brand, hasn't really put out successful products like GMail in a long while.

That’s semantics. It started as an X project and was pulled out into Alphabet under Larry when they made the Alphabet change. Now that Sundar is CEO at both levels the distinction between the two entities has become fuzzy again.

Google Fit APIs were deprecated in favor of Health Connect, which gives users more control of their data (and is used by Google Fit itself). This is a win for users, not your usual killed by Google product.

Pixel

Colab arguably

Cloud. Waymo.

They launched their stock price up 15x.

This sounds so negative.

I still use google maps every day.

Google Pixel and Google Photos are getting smart AI stuff.

The Google Pixel Camera is crazy good (at least my experience with pro 8)

I was going to say wait a few years before you commit to any new service or product but the Google graveyard is filled with projects that went longer.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

My aunt lost her Android phone. I thought I knew of a cool way to show her to find it using Timeline in Maps. We could maybe tell where it last was located? No luck because Google has discontinued Timeline in Maps from desktop it's now only available on the phone on Android.

"Timeline is no longer available on web browsers. To view or change your Timeline settings, go to Activity controls."

Another disastrous thing is the miriade of settings in the Google app

Me and my mother share a Google One account to have more storage for photos and turns out that we share the calendar.

I really tried to find out how the fuck i disable it but nothing, i got in a 2008 ass settings page in the search of how to disable it but nothing. Settings page only available on desktop, the mobile version was the 2008 style page.

What's the consistency there?

But the most important part, why the fuck would you make it a default?

I think Google did this to protect their users from snooping. If they have everybody's timeline on their servers, governments can request that information. And governments like to do that:

https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?hl=...

Not sure if there are multiple products called "Timelines" but I can access my timeline on maps.google.com just fine and it has all my latest data.

That was an improvement.

Google has Find My Device for that situation. Hopefully she had it set up.

I keep hearing this, and yet can still access it? Is it dying slowly?

If I'd want a watch that can track metrics like heart and blood, and especially also sleep, has a battery life in the 1-week range (rather than 1-day range), does not require a phone (especially not for setup, but ok if it optionally can use one as additional UI or for local file transfer), and allows getting daily/hourly/... data of the metrics it tracks as a CSV or similar file onto my desktop computer in some way, what are some good suggestions here?

Polar have a desktop app and I didn't need to set up my Polar V watch via a phone (although I do use the phone app). No idea about the hourly data. The battery lasts 4-5 days.

Did you already check Garmin watches? They have great battery life and allow local data access via their FIT SDK [1].

[1] https://developer.garmin.com/fit/overview/

If you don't want to depend on a huge corporation with your watch, consider PineTime running free software. (Although at the moment it's not in stock.)

Hopefully I have my backup from Google Reader [1]. One more thing, what was incredible about Google Reader is that you can go back in time to the blog because they indexed previous RSSs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader

The question what will be available in Google Corporation?

Embrace enshittification.

Extend, embrace, enshittify.-

"Enshittify" is the new extinguisher.-

embrace, extend, experiment, exacerbate, exclude, enshittify, extinguish

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