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- cross-posted to:
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This is just shutting down an already outdated API. Devs should be moving off of it, and now it has a year out set for full removal instead of just being deprecated.
But in typical Google fashion, the replacement is inferior and doesn’t have the same features
However, there is no replacement for the Goals API that lets Google Fit users set “how many steps and heart points they want to aim for each day.”
Come on now, that’s not just a Google problem and you know it, no need to shit on Google for something damn near every tech company does. Google does their fair share of shitty things, this isn’t really one of them.
Health connect doesn’t set your step count goals, because what it does in the back end (because that’s what it is, the back end API) is set a way to read and write that data.
The front end, Google Fit, also connects to health connect on the back end. And the Fit app is not given a shutdown here, just the API it also uses in the back end.
I suspect Google will stop developing Fit, as they kind of already have. However, all these varieties of other apps out there (Fitbit, Withings Health Mate, Samsung Health, MyFitnessPal, etc) can use health connect data, and do allow you to set goals. They use the same data, and now are more interoperable with Health Connect than they were with the Fit API.
If it’s not killed by google, it’s replaced with a crappier version. Having developed against many Google APIs, “deprecation” is a very frequent word they use. Most of the time there is no stated reason why an API had to be deprecated, just that it is being deprecated. They also give minimal time to switch over, the worst one I had was PubSub’s API having a mandated migration we had to perform - in under 3 weeks. Very difficult for an already tasked team of engineers who had a mountain of other more pressing work. Why I actively push against working on GCP, or google products at all. I’ve successfully pushed 2 companies away from using Google cloud now.
Microsoft, as an example of the opposite, will have years long deprecation strategies, and usually go overboard with making sure engineers have a good replacement, and documentation on how to migrate. They have a lot to be hated for, but damn are they good with managing downstream engineers.
Wait until you realize Microsoft actually cares only because they have already analyzed and predicted that this would hurt their bottom line.
History is full of companies who went under because they didn’t analyze and predict what would hurt their bottom line…
AWS also rarely turns off services that customers are using going so far as to support customers using outdated services for years. Of the major cloud providers only Google does this.
Public Folders have entered the chat
Yes, worst clickbait title I’ve seen in a while. Health Connect was announced 2 years ago…
Dang, I just got a heart monitor that synced to Google fit to get my target heart points tracked…
If it uses health connect to send the data it’s still all good. And if you bought something recently made, it should.
😅 ok great.
Just to be clear - it’s the API that’s shutting down, not the app. Not that Google has put in effort for the app either, it hasn’t updated since health connect afaik, but health connect is the health and fitness tooling going forward.
Fitbit has health connect support now, so even if they shift and drop Fit (I hope not, though I also hoped they wouldn’t kill the web interface), and make Fitbit the main Google fitness app, it will still work with Fitbit as the app.
I’m using polar bears. 🤞
I’ve got a polar h10 myself, I know their app still connects to Fit not health connect, but I’m sure they will update.
I actually made an app to make use of health connect with my polar h10 for entirely different purposes, it’s really a pretty minor backend change for them to make, so I’m sure Beat will get an update.
I got the coospo one, but found the polar apps easy enough to use.
Got it, checking their list of compatible apps…
Worst case you could connect to Strava as a go-between should polar be far behind on health connect (again, doubt they would be).
But checking the coospo compatibility, it seems there are a ton of them that all support health connect with coospo, so you wouldn’t be shut out even if health connect wasn’t ready for Polar, you’ll have a ton of options. Including using polar to sync to something that syncs via health connect.
Which is kind of what I do btw, aside from the app for the completely irregular use case I mentioned, I sync polar to Strava, Strava to Fit via health connect. I do that because fairly often I am using polar while cycling, so that’s how I want my data to go. But I then found strength training shares nicely too, and running polar beat and my workout app, I can track all my workout routine items (jefit), which syncs via health connect, and then polar goes to Strava goes to health connect, and it all shows as a single session with great HR data.
So yeah, you’ll be fine.
Health Connect “beta” is a battery hog. Until they fix those issues, it’s a non-starter for anyone caring about battery life.
Not really the question I was answering, but that’s not actually a health connect problem.
Withings had an issue, and the way they were connecting to it, which caused a battery drain. To be specific, withings health mate was constantly reading health connect data, which caused a massive power drain.
I’m not aware of any other battery issues with health connect other than Withings and their Health Mate app (specifically reading, not writing).
(Edit: why, why would autocorrect change writing to riding? For shame. To me, for not noticing sooner.)
RIP again my Pebble
I’m still using my pebble. Works mostly fine still.
Mostly
Yes, and in that state it’s still better than any other smart watch I’ve tried. By a lot, too. Which is honestly just sad, but here we are…
I bought a second PTS back in the day, and kept my original as a backup. I just recently had to switch back to it because the daily driver couldn’t hold a charge anymore.
I tried looking for a replacement smart watch that could do the things I need it to do, and there’s still not one on the market at any price point that can do
- Always-on color display
- 7+ days between charging
- Notifications with full messages on the watch
- Ability to respond to messages from the watch via both canned responses and voice dictation
- Smart alarms (activate up to 30m before alarm time, if watch detects you’re no longer in deep sleep)
- Customizable watch faces
- Ability to develop custom watch apps
Not sure if you know, but there is an app called gadgetbridge, open source that can interface with many wearable devices including pebble. I use it with an amazfit bip and it works very well. You should give it a try.
That’s fascinating software! Thanks for the share!
yes but until possible i like to have the working weather on my watchface and gadgetbridge is very opinionated against that as it could be used for user tracking, so any kind of internet access is blocked
GadgetBridge is not really against supporting online-only functions, it just can’t be part of the main app. Weather Providers is what you’re looking for.
if i understood right the weather app/watchface needs to be updated for being compatible with this - the official pebble app patched by rebble should work but i think my favorite watchface doesn’t support it
Oh sorry, I understood your comment as saying that you couldn’t get weather info with GadgetBridge because of its somewhat unique architecture. If you’re using a different companion app then apps for GadgetBridge probably won’t work.
Also I’m not familiar with Pebble, I’m just assuming it works similarly to other GadgetBridge-supported watches / bands like the Mi Band I use.
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This is why they bought Fitbit, right?
The Fitbit app still doesn’t cover everything Google Fit does. As is tradition. I can’t believe I bought another device.
At this point I’m guessing there’s some internal rule that every once in a while forces them to replace products with inferior, incomplete alternatives written from scratch, and only reach feature parity 3-4 years after the shutdown, when everyone gave up and found an alternative.
The rules apparently states that in order to maximize confusion it must be a similar but different name, that users don’t have a guided migration and that the app must be separately downloaded. It’s extremely forbidden to just update the existing app
Are you a high ranking manager at Google? That seems like insider knowledge 🤔
We have a winner! Employees are rewarded for starting new influential projects, not maintaining or improving existing ones. Thus, there’s intense pressure to propose new products and shut down the old one to beef out the performance reviews.
Hence, Google can almost never take a product from concept to maturity because it hurts the people working on the project to do so.
Any recommendations for an automatic step counter?
