Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL;DR Google is adding native step tracking to Health Connect, changing its function from just a data hub for other apps.
This marks a significant shift, as Health Connect will now be able to collect its own data directly from the phone’s sensors.
This could be the first step in turning Health Connect into a comprehensive health platform, though the feature isn’t fully working yet.
If you want to improve your health, there’s no shortage of services you can use to track your health, fitness, and wellness metrics. Some options are better than others at tracking certain metrics, so many people mix and match to find the best solution. To simplify this for users, Google created Health Connect in 2022 to serve as a central hub for all this data. Currently, the service only facilitates data sharing between different health and fitness apps and doesn’t track any data on its own. That’s set to change, though, as Google is working on adding native step tracking support to Health Connect.
Health Connect is both an app and a framework for storing health data. Using the framework, apps can write data like steps, heart rate, and sleep to Health Connect, which stores that data in a secure, on-device database. Other apps can then use the same framework to read that data from Health Connect, either to add it to their own database or to perform analysis on it. Through the Health Connect app, users can manage which apps have permission to read or write this data.
This approach has some key benefits. Health and fitness apps only have to share data with a single other app — Health Connect — rather than dozens of others, saving developers significant time and effort. It also makes it easier for consumers to migrate between or use multiple services.
Health Connect was integrated into the OS starting with Android 14, so all users have to do is download the health or fitness app of their choice and enable data sharing with Health Connect. Once connected, the Health Connect app will display the data these apps contribute, whether it’s from the phone’s sensors or from a connected device like a smartwatch.
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
Currently, Health Connect doesn’t collect any data of its own, but I’ve spotted evidence that Google is adding native step tracking support to the app. While digging through the latest 2508 Android Canary release, I found a new “Devices” page in Health Connect settings. Tapping it opened a page with a list of connected devices, including an “unknown device” labeled as the current phone. Selecting this “unknown device” opened a “device info” page showing that it’s only allowed to write step data to Health Connect, which other apps can then access via the framework.
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