It feels like every time you buy a new fitness tracker or smartwatch, even if it is one of the best on the market today, they often push you to install their own companion app to get the most out of your fitness metrics. There's got to be a better way to do this, right? Back at I/O earlier this year, Google shared its solution to gather all that disparate data through its new Health Connect platform. With the Pixel Watch here, it looks like the company is finally ready to move forward, and right now Google Fit is being updated with Health Connect integration.

After upgrading the Google Fit app to version 2.89.3, you should see a prompt suggesting that you sync the app with Health Connect. That's going to act as a hub of sorts, allowing your wearables’ companion apps to store data on your device. This also makes it easier to sync your data between different apps, and now, you can see all of it in one place on in Google Fit.

The integration also works the other way around, allowing Google Fit data like calories, heart rate, and other body measurements to be shared among all your fitness apps. Google explains you can configure what types of data Health Connect sends to and receives from Fit. When Fit reads data from Health Connect, it gets stored to your Google account, to help provide better fitness and health-related insights.

Meanwhile, Google Fit remains the go-to app for syncing a Wear OS smartwatch to your phone for most of us, because the new Fitbit app for Wear OS is only for the Pixel Watch. The company has also clarified that the Google Fit and Fitbit apps will continue to exist alongside each other for the time being.

Until that changes, you can integrate data from apps like Strava and Samsung Health directly into Google Fit, through their own Health Connect support. We're curious to see just how well this all ends up working, considering how many moving parts there are and how many different apps are potentially involved. Here's hoping that Health Connect integration with Google Fit is able to provide the sort of system-level universal health interface that Android sorely needs.

Thanks: Mishaal