Apple HealthKit vs. Google Fit: Survival of the Fittest
Welcome to the battle of the robotic personal trainers.
On Tuesday, Google released an app called Google Fit, which can track and store information on basic activities like running, walking, and biking to help you set and meet daily exercise goals.
This is not an entirely novel idea. Fitness companies like Fitbit and individual apps like MyFitnessPal have been aiming to empower you with data about your health for a while now. In September, meanwhile, Apple debuted its own data-oriented fitness ecosystem named HealthKit, the digital equivalent of the folder your doctor pulls up when he wants to see your health history.
So, now that we’ve seen the fitness apps from both Apple and Google, we had to ask: Which one is better?
We’ve been playing with HealthKit for about a month now. On Wednesday, Yahoo Tech got a hands-on demo with Google Fit to learn more about how it’ll work with the company’s latest line of smartwatches, tablets, and phones. Below, a comparison of the two systems. May the fittest app win.
Related: Everything You Need to Know About Apple’s HealthKit and How It Might Work with the Apple Watch
Design
Google Fit’s layout adopts the same look and feel of Android’s latest operating system, Lollipop, which will be debuting on select smartphones Nov. 3. It’s a subtle, flat design (what it’s calling “Material”), brightly colored and sparse in animation. It’s also artfully tuned with subtle haptic feedback, which happens in the Google Fit app whenever you manually enter a solid digit. I think of it as the phone’s way of tapping you on the shoulder and saying, Pay attention! The info you’re about to enter will influence your overall results and goals. It’s very much appreciated, as I’m often a haphazard tapper.
On phones and tablets, Google Fit’s data is displayed via a ring much like the design of the imminent Apple Watch (or even the Human exercise app). You can swipe between two views: hours of activity and steps. Each activity you engage in — walking, running, biking, and “other” — goes into the circle and is differentiated by a unique color. When you reach whatever preset goals you’ve set for yourself, the ring will reach completion, and a cute animated graphic will reward you for your hard work.
If you want to see more detailed information about your day, you can swipe below to see a graph of your activity.
This looks nice, but it’s a much less efficient display of data than Apple’s HealthKit, which allows you to compare multiple, customizable metrics — ranging from alcohol intake to sleep quality to walking and running distance — in different brightly colored cards, brought together on one customizable dashboard.
Why Google Fit’s circular design wasn’t used for the Android Wear interface boggles me. (Perhaps only Google’s Vice President of Design Matias Duarte knows). Instead there’s a weird cartoon graphic that displays the number of steps you’ve taken (even Tracks, a separate Android Wear app, fails to graphically display anything of value on the watch face).
People buy wearables because they want to be able to glance at their wrists and see a snapshot of their progress (read, a circle moving toward completion). Good luck juggling a giant Nexus smartphone to open Google Fit while also running on a treadmill. I’d much rather be looking at something like this:
Overall, Apple’s HealthKit understands the format of its device’s hardware much better. And that translates to a much more enjoyable experience for you in the long run. (Pun intended.)
Data
Apple opened up HealthKit for developers at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Afterward, third party apps and device-makers flocked to the company, hoping that they could integrate their apps and health-tracking gadgets with its database. This gives Apple Health users a slew of options in addition to the basic data (number of steps taken, for example) that the iPhone can track. Early adopters include a slew of advanced exercise and diet apps, and quite a few inventive pieces of hardware, including a connected breathalyzer.
Though brand spanking new, Google Fit is nowhere near this level. It can currently filter in information from third-party apps like Strava, Withings, Runtastic, Runkeeper, and Noom Coach, but its integration with other hardware seems to barely exist. At today’s demo, we saw a product manager connect a scale with her Android Wear, which supposedly registered her weight automatically. She said more partnerships like this are in the works, and we’ll hear about them by mid-November.
For now, though, Apple is out front.
The waiting game
We’re in a bit of a predicament here. Google beat Apple in releasing a smartwatch, so it’s not yet possible to compare how each system works on its corresponding device. And maybe by the time Apple releases its watch in “early 2015,” Google Fit will have made leaps and bounds in partnering with apps and hardware companies that will give it a stronger foundation of data. But when it comes to first impressions, it seems there’s been much more thought about how Apple’s HealthKit will develop and expand in the future. Not to mention, it’s a breeze to use on iOS 8 and already syncs my data with a slew of cool gadgets.
Google Fit is still young and clunky but hoping to become a muse to developers. Who knows if, or when, it will ever prove a good fit.
Follow Alyssa Bereznak on Twitter or email her.
