Google Fit guide: Everything you need to know about Google's fitness platform

Google Fit is Google’s long-running fitness app, built around simplicity and basic activity tracking. It covers the essentials and works with a range of fitness trackers and smartwatches, but it isn’t as feature-rich as many modern health platforms. In this guide, we’ll break down what Google Fit still does well, where it falls short, and who it makes sense for today. 

What is Google Fit?

Depending on what type of user you are, you’ll either think Google Fit is great or way too simple for what you need. Fitness apps can be hit or miss. Some are overly packed with features and require a steep learning curve, while others offer an intuitive design but fewer tools. Google Fit falls into the latter category. On its own, Google Fit is a basic fitness app. Historically, it has also acted as a hub for health and fitness data gathered from popular apps and trackers. If you’re more familiar with Apple’s ecosystem, Google Fit has long been Google’s answer to Apple Health.

However, Google is now shifting most health-data integrations away from the legacy Google Fit APIs to Health Connect, a newer Android health data platform that centralizes health and fitness information across apps and devices. While the Fit app still exists as a place to view activity and metrics, the underlying integration layer that many apps once relied on is being replaced. At the same time, Google continues to lean more heavily on Fitbit’s platform for advanced health features, which further pushes Google Fit into a simpler, dashboard-style role.

What does it track?

Like many fitness apps, Google Fit covers the basics. Users can track or view the following health and fitness metrics:

• Steps
• Calories burned
• Distance
• Elevation
• Move Minutes
• Heart Points (more on these below)
• Logged workouts (such as walking, running, cycling, and more)

Google Fit can also display sleep data from compatible trackers or apps and show metrics like heart rate, weight, and blood pressure when recorded manually or synced from supported sources.

Google Fit profile and navigating the app

Users sign into Google Fit with an existing Google account. Once you tell the app a little about yourself (gender, date of birth, weight, and height), you can set up your activity goals. Google Fit uses your step count as your main daily goal.

Navigating the app

There are four main sections of the Google Fit app: Home, Journal, Browse, and Profile.

• Home: The Home screen shows an overview of your current day’s activities and health metrics. Here, you’ll see all the metrics listed above (steps, calories, etc.), as well as your recent workouts, instructional videos, and health and wellness recommendations from sources like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM).
• Journal: The Journal tab acts as a schedule or log. It’s a simple, scrollable list of all your recorded activities.
• Browse: The Browse page houses shortcuts to core metrics, from activity and body measurements to vitals and sleep. This page includes data from other third-party products, connected apps, and devices.
• Profile: The Profile page is where you’ll adjust your goals for Steps and Heart Points, as well as your personal information.

Back on the Home tab, users can tap a colorful ring widget. This will take you to a summary of your daily, weekly, and monthly views of your Heart Points and steps data. If you scroll through your history and want more details on your activity stats for a specific day, click on the day to find all your recorded activities. From there, you can click on an individual activity to see more minute details like distance, steps, calories, and pace metrics.

Back on the Home tab again, there’s also a small floating action button at the bottom right that looks like a plus sign with Google’s color scheme. This button lets you manually track a workout or add an activity, weight measurement, or blood pressure reading.

Dark mode

Google Fit also has a dark mode. If you have an Android phone with an OLED display, dark mode will help save a bit of battery life. To turn on Google Fit dark mode, select the Profile tab, then the settings cog at the top of your screen, then scroll down to Theme. Set it to light, dark, or system default.

Move Minutes and Heart Points

Google worked with the American Heart Association (AHA) to create two goals based on the Heart Association’s activity recommendations. The results are Move Minutes and Heart Points.

• Move Minutes: Move Minutes is another way to say “active time.” You earn Move Minutes for every physical activity you do, including walks, runs, swims, yoga, and much more.
• Heart Points: Heart Points relate to the activities you perform of higher intensity. One minute of moderately intense exercise, like a swift walk, earns one Heart Point. You earn double Heart Points if you complete even more intense activities, like a long run.

Google’s goal with Move Minutes and Heart Points is to make the results of exercising easier to understand. It’s a different approach from other fitness apps, but that’s not bad. It just means that if you’re already used to tracking your fitness with another app, you may not want to dive right into Google Fit. On the other hand, the focus on Move Minutes and Heart Points is a seriously valuable way to guide users on how to stay healthy.

Apps that can share data with Google Fit (often via Health Connect)

You may want to pair Google Fit with other apps for a few reasons. For example, you might track workouts using a service like Strava but prefer Google Fit’s Move Minutes and Heart Points system. In many cases, this allows your activity data to appear inside Google Fit. That said, most modern app integrations now rely on Health Connect rather than direct Google Fit connections. Many third-party apps share data with Health Connect, which Google Fit can then read and display. 

You can also use Google Fit alongside Wear OS devices and other fitness platforms if you prefer a different app for deeper insights while still keeping Google Fit as a simple dashboard.

Popular third-party apps that can share data

What apps are compatible with Google Fit? App availability and integration methods may vary by region and version, and some apps share data with Google Fit indirectly through Health Connect rather than through a direct connection. Below is a list of some popular apps that work well. The most accurate way to see which apps can share data with Google Fit is by checking Health Connect on your phone (via Settings > Health Connect), where you can view and manage connected apps and permissions.

Devices compatible with Google Fit

Many fitness and health devices can share data with Google Fit, including a wide range of smartwatches and accessories. While Google Fit is available on Wear OS, it is no longer the primary fitness platform on most modern Wear OS devices, with many manufacturers instead relying on their own apps (such as Fitbit on the Pixel Watch or Samsung Health on Galaxy Watches).

Most Wear OS smartwatches can use Google Fit, but the data the app records will depend on the sensors built into the device. For example, Google Fit won’t show heart rate data if your watch doesn’t have a heart rate sensor. However, you can also pair compatible external heart rate sensors (such as chest straps or armbands) directly with Google Fit.

Non-Wear OS devices 

Many non-Wear OS devices can also share data with Google Fit, often through their companion apps or via Health Connect. Some of the most popular options include:

• Amazfit smartwatches (via Zepp)
• Eufy Smart Scale, Smart Scale C1, Smart Scale P1
• Garmin watches 
• Polar fitness watches
• Withings Body Cardio, Body, and Body Plus smart scales
• Withings ScanWatch 2, ScanWatch Lite, ScanWatch Horizon, ScanWatch, Move, and Move ECG
• Xiaomi Mi Bands

Do you need the Google Fit app if you already own a Google Fit-compatible device?

Nope, but you won’t get the best experience without it. Smartwatches and fitness trackers don’t have big screens, which makes viewing detailed activity information more difficult. Install the Google Fit app on your phone to ensure you’re getting the most data in the best way possible. Plus, if you want to connect your Google Fit account to another fitness app unavailable on your watch, you’ll need to download the Google Fit app on your phone.

The future of Google Fit

Google’s fitness and health products are a bit all over the place. The company still offers Google Fit, a lightweight fitness app that can run on Wear OS and display basic activity data. However, Google is no longer positioning Fit as the center of its health platform, as it also now owns Fitbit. The Fitbit platform is the company’s central hub for advanced health and fitness features. On the Pixel Watch series, fitness and health experiences are built around Fitbit, not Google Fit, with everything from activity tracking to sleep and heart metrics living inside Fitbit’s ecosystem.

Rather than merging the two apps into one, Google appears to be treating Google Fit as a simple dashboard and Fitbit as its full-featured health platform, with Health Connect acting as the underlying system to share data across Android.

What’s missing from Google Fit?

Google Fit’s strengths lie in its simplicity. It’s the app version of a basic activity tracker; it keeps track of your simplest health metrics and not much more. 

• Social components: The central aspect missing from Google Fit is a social platform. Other popular fitness apps, like Strava, emphasize community. Reaching out to a community of like-minded people to help you along your fitness journey can be extremely helpful for some users.
• Built-in training programs or coaching: Google Fit also lacks native training plans and structured programs. The app pushes workout videos from YouTube, rather than providing guided plans or adaptive coaching.
• Long-term activity analysis: Google Fit shows trends for metrics like weight, heart rate, Move Minutes, and Heart Points, but offers fewer long-term insights for individual workouts.
• Built-in nutrition or hydration tracking: You can manually track your weight, but nutrition and hydration must be handled through third-party apps.
• Web interface: Google shut down the Google Fit web interface in 2019, leaving the mobile app as the only way to access your data.

Some of these missing features are instead handled by Fitbit and third-party apps, with data often shared back to Google Fit via Health Connect.

Overall, Google Fit is simple, clean, and compatible with many other fitness and health apps. Move Minutes and Heart Points are genuinely useful metrics to help people get and stay healthy. Whether it’s the app for you will likely depend on what type of athlete you are and whether or not you’re already invested in another app.

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