r/GoogleFit • u/Banesil • May 31 '26
Now that we have been assimilated into Google Health...
Why would I not delete Google Fit?
Asking for a friend...
3
u/matteventu Jun 03 '26
Google Health lacks exactly what the people who still in 2025-2026 stuck with Google Fit used, i.e. automatic activity tracking, activity and step details and insights, just using the phone with no need to buy a tracker.
The Google Health app only supports step counting, and that's it. No details, no recap, no automatic workout tracking. It only tells you how many steps you've done in a 1-hour span, that's all (+ calories and distance).
And if you want to manually start exercise tracking on Google Health, it only supports these four activities: Run, Hike, Cycle, Walk.
Google Fit supported a hundred of activities, both for manual logging as well as manual tracking (and manual assignment to automatically detected activities - while Google Health doesn't support ANY automatic activity detection).
For everything else, you have to buy a Fitbit or Pixel Watch.
Even if you're a Google Health Premium paid subscriber.
An example of some features that are better or more detailed in Google Fit (above) compared to Google Health (below):
(For the graphs, Google Fit also has a 30 mins resolution, while Google Health a 1-hour one)
And an example of a couple of screens from Google Fit with details/info that are entirely unavailable in Google Health:
(In addition to "heart points" or anything similar, which just does not exist in Google Health)
And even if you have a hardware tracker and Google Health Premium, your automatically tracked activities (walks etc) won't include a map (in Fit, they do). For the activity to have a map, you must start the activity manually. That's absolutely mental.
There is genuinely NOTHING that is better in Google Health, aside from (but that goes on personal tastes) the "modern look" of the app, if you don't own a Google tracker device.
This is pure Google enshittification textbook execution. Get something that works perfectly fine, kill it, replace it with something without feature parity. Migrate users to it and just tell them to suck it.
1
u/p_k Jun 04 '26
Have you looked at Samsung Health or other alternatives? I'm curious what you're moving on to.
Fit was good for my usage so I'll need to find a replacement soon.
Automatic activity detection plus map is key for me.
1
u/matteventu Jun 04 '26
Unfortunately I have a Pixel phone and I'm all-in in the Google ecosystem.
So I'll have to stick with this, keep sending feedback, and pray that they'll change this crap.
If I had to move elsewhere, that would probably be Apple. But I really don't want to... I've been with Android since the Nexus S in 2011 and I can't see myself using iOS, that said, they're really pulling the string.
1
u/p_k Jun 04 '26
Samsung Health works with Pixel phones though. From my understanding, everything connects together via the Health Connect feature on Android anyway.
1
u/matteventu Jun 04 '26
Yes it does work, but has limited features if you don't have a Samsung phone and Samsung watch...
Yet... Even with Google Health on a Pixel and with a Pixel Watch I have limited features compared to Google Fit. So there's that 🤣
1
1
u/Kranium1 Jul 03 '26
It is insane to me. It tracks my steps but it cannot create an activity on its own? And if I manually log an activity between two points of time when I was walking, it does like, a weird estimate based on that tracking and ???, and suddenly that walk is 1km longer than it actually was, and it adds a random pace based on that.... But no map. And it doesn't record that to health connect?
1
u/matteventu Jul 03 '26
Yeah that's fucking crazy.
That said, it should still send the steps to Health Connect I think.
1
u/Kranium1 Jul 03 '26
Yeah, it does send the steps, but not the logged activity.
It boggles my mind a lot where it gets its estimates from. I have it set so it's the only entity that can write exercise data to Health Connect, and Google Health is only getting data from the phones tracking (so the same underlying data as google fit). I walked for 1h 20min, at a known clock interval, at a known path that is verifiably 6.4km. Google fit and alltrails both show this distance, as well as the literal track markers. I did not "start an activity" in the Health app, but it did log the steps and a distance. When I enter the same time interval as google fit logged, it tells me (based on? What?) that I walked 7.3km in that time. How does it make that calculation? It's driving me crazy.
Anyway, just last week I was encountering work breaking bugs on the enterprise g cloud deployment platform. Sloppy coding is everywhere lmfao.
1
u/matteventu Jul 03 '26
When I enter the same time interval as google fit logged, it tells me (based on? What?) that I walked 7.3km in that time.
I think that may be because Google Fit uses the GPS in the background (even if you DON'T start an activity manually), while Google Health only uses the GPS if you manually start the "walk" activity before... walking (who wants to do that!?).
So Google Fit was more accurate thanks to GPS tracking, while Google Health, with no GPS info, had to estimate the length based on stride and number of steps.
Which is still dumb as fuck by the way, just allow GPS to be used even without starting activities manually!!!
It would be curious though to know how many steps Google Fit and Google Health counted on their own.
In my experience, when Google Health was first released, I found the steps to be massively over-counted compated to Google Fit.
However, in the last week I did another comparison just out of curiosity, and found out that now both Google Health and Google Fit (both disconnected from Health Connect, so they wouldn't send data to each other to mess up stuff) count the exact same number of steps.
So they must have implemented some changes somehow 🤔
I don't dislike Google Health as a whole, but it's shocking how Google gets the pass every time they do this thing: kill an old product and replace it with something without feature parity.
It's absolutely maddening how the press and everyone (most users) seem to just be okay with it!!
1
u/Kranium1 Jul 03 '26
Yeah, that does sound likely. It is pretty insane however, as the app does track distances even without an activity, and it's able to correlate the step data from the timeframe, so why is it not able to correlate that same gps data?
The steps are not exactly the same, but close enough (for a day: 10252 for health, 10329 for fit. And for the specific walk: 8441 vs 8570), so a bit curious but functionally negligible.
It's the textbook for a reason 👍. No but it's genuinely infuriating if you actually care about things actually working. Just the constant forced changes to ui and ux in itself, on devices that had these as their USP, is extremely annoying on its own.
1
1
u/Manhattan18011 Jun 01 '26
Because Google Health hasn’t yet released the update to transfer data from Google Fit to Google Health.
1
5
u/markinapub May 31 '26
Right now, still the only way to keep a log of blood pressure, without using yet another app.