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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> If I can't record squats, then what's the point?

The point is to be one front end to "[a]n open platform that lets users control their fitness data" and "lets developers build smarter apps and manufacturers focus on creating amazing devices." [1]

> You can manually add activities but the only options are: Walking, Running, Biking, Other.

The backend is aware of more activity types [2], so I suspect its either getting the right UX for that is the issue, or that developing the what to do with other activities to make the data meaningful that is holding back putting more into the app UI.

[1] https://developers.google.com/fit/ -- the page that, for me, comes up as the first web (not news) result for a Google search for "Google Fit".

[2] https://developers.google.com/fit/rest/v1/reference/activity...

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lets developers build smarter apps and manufacturers focus on creating amazing devices

They don't seem to have mentioned "and lets us sell all the data to the highest bidder"

I don't understand why you are getting downvoted. There was some obvious snark in your comment, but I am also not clear on how else Google could monetize this product unless it is through the use of the collected data?

Why should every small component be monetised? Google has an interest in Android, and if they felt that Android needed something like this, then the continued revenue from people using Android services benefit them because most of those people would use the 'greater' Google services, not just Fit.

Does it mean that when Google created Keep, they were looking for a way of making money off our notes and to-do lists?

Because truly capitalist people aren't happy with just enough money, they want all the money.

You should expect that keep data is being tracked the same way gmail and calendar data is. With this your health will also be in the data package.

Google monetizes the product by the fact that:

(1) Part of the infrastructure is tied to Android, so it promotes Android and their many ways of monetizing the Android ecosystem, (2) Its grows the market for cloud services, for which Google is an infrastructure provider.

Both of these are fairly indirect, but that's not uncommon for Google. Google has lots of projects that aren't directly monetized, but support products that are.

most of the time google collects data it is because users want this data to be collected.

If Google would not store emails on their servers, people would leave Gmail and go to a service that does. If Google would store emails, but end-to-end encrypt it, people would leave gmail and put their data to a service with a working spam filter.

Google Now is very popular and a reason why people use Google services.

For Googles revenue it is far more important that people use their services (and therefore watch ads), then it is to create "better ads". I say that because nobody seems to get "smart ads" that are actually interesting to them. Googles gmail ads are little more than "if word is used in conversation, show product related to word".

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