2014 feels like forever ago. October 28, 2014 is when Google launched the Google Fit app and now, four years, 11 months and counting, the app has finally hit 50 million downloads on the Play Store.

Fifty million downloads in almost five years is no big deal, obviously. The fact that Google Fit does not come pre-installed on devices — it is only preloaded on smartwatches running Wear OS — has something to do with it taking almost forever to hit that number.

Now, on paper, Google Fit has everything going for it. It tracks activity, heart points, and helps maintain a health journal. Even if you have just downloaded the app, if you give it location permissions, it can pull up how much you have walked in the recent past as well. This feature is a huge advantage over similar apps: with a history of activity in place, Google Fit can set better goals for you. 

Admittedly though, one doesn't have to ponder much to see what took a perfectly good fitness app forever to notch up that 50 million score. Google Fit has had its share of problems: Google shut down the website earlier this year, the service was broken for months without a fix, and you just need to read the reviews of the app on the Play Store to find enough complaints about it not updating location or steps data, or not even syncing with other fitness apps. 

With the kind of data that is at Google’s disposal, added with what it could have collected and collated over the years, this Fit app could have been the one-stop solution for everything health-related on Android.

And yet.