Developers Get Preview Access To The Next Smartphone Battleground
Building on the presentation at the recent I/O Developers Conference, Google has released the Preview SDK for the Google Fit platform. Hardware manufacturers and third-party developers now have the ability to work with three sets of APIs covering access to sensor data, recording data functionality, and data manipulation of fitness and health data captured by a Android platform.
This initial release only covers local data on a device. Cloud services will be added at a later date, and that’s where the really interesting battles will take place.
Google Fit will integrate with a number of solutions from Google. Your Android powered smartphone or tablet is the obvious first point of contact, but you should also consider Google Fit’s potential integration with Google Glass and the Android Wear smartwatch program. All of these devices can use their sensor suite to gather and relay health data.
Assuming you have a version of the Google Play Services that runs Google Fit (which means, at the time of writing, to be using a developer preview of Android L), users will be able to tie together many of the building blocks of Google Fit to provide a hopefully holistic vision of their fitness patterns.
Google’s hope is that developers both of standalone fitness apps, and those working with a mix of software and hardware, will adopt Google Fit as a ‘standard’. This will allow interoperability between devices, the portability of user data, and the ability to collate data from multiple devices and sources to create a better picture of someone’s health and fitness.
It also means that developers will be handing Google Fit the primary roles of storage and interface of users’ data. That’s a risky bet for a manufacturer. Google gains ultimate authority over the data, and by making it easier to collect, collate, and change, puts the needs of Google ahead of the manufacturers and suppliers. I’ve no doubt that Google Fit will make it a lot easier to write apps and develop software initially, but in the medium to long-term you would be tied to Google’s vision of what a health and fitness accessory should be like. If that vision changes, or it diverges from your view as manufacturer, will Google happily let you go your own way, or will you be asked (nicely) to consider how Google see the future?
It also feels like Google is pushing this out at the same time as Apple is pushing their vision of fitness and tracking through Apple HealthKit to try to win hearts and minds of the early software adopters. Once more, a service recently announced (at WWDC), tied into the new version of a mobile operating system (iOS 8), and looking for developer support ahead of the main product launch and consumer push at the end of 2014.
One more, users are going to be asked to decide which competing vision of health they trust.
Samsung Gear Fit (image: Ewan Spence)
Samsung Gear Fit (image: Ewan Spence)
Actually, that’s not even the case. If you are already invested in either iOS or Android you are pretty much locked in to that platform’s vision of health and fitness before you even start. More importantly, you will need to accept that any data captured by the respective platforms will be used in accordance with that platform’s view on customer data.
There will always be independent solutions, but Apple and Google are going to be pushing health heavily this fall on their platforms. They need to capture hardware manufactures, they need to bring developers on board to do interesting things with the data sets. That’s where the battle will be. Not with the end users. As to why it’s not like the majority of them will switch platform because of their heartbeat data. Health is an easy differentiator, but it’s also a weak differentiator. I cannot think of anyone who will switch platforms to follow a specific health software solution.
Still, expect the marketing teams to big up health in the marketing and commercials. It’s easy to explain, and the respective companies are preaching to a captive audience.
Building on the presentation at the recent I/O Developers Conference, Google has released the Preview SDK for the Google Fit platform. Hardware manufacturers and third-party developers now have the ability to work with three sets of APIs covering access to sensor data, recording data functionality, and data manipulation of fitness and health data captured by a Android platform.
This initial release only covers local data on a device. Cloud services will be added at a later date, and that’s where the really interesting battles will take place.
Google Fit will integrate with a number of solutions from Google. Your Android powered smartphone or tablet is the obvious first point of contact, but you should also consider Google Fit’s potential integration with Google Glass and the Android Wear smartwatch program. All of these devices can use their sensor suite to gather and relay health data.
Assuming you have a version of the Google Play Services that runs Google Fit (which means, at the time of writing, to be using a developer preview of Android L), users will be able to tie together many of the building blocks of Google Fit to provide a hopefully holistic vision of their fitness patterns.
Google’s hope is that developers both of standalone fitness apps, and those working with a mix of software and hardware, will adopt Google Fit as a ‘standard’. This will allow interoperability between devices, the portability of user data, and the ability to collate data from multiple devices and sources to create a better picture of someone’s health and fitness.
It also means that developers will be handing Google Fit the primary roles of storage and interface of users’ data. That’s a risky bet for a manufacturer. Google gains ultimate authority over the data, and by making it easier to collect, collate, and change, puts the needs of Google ahead of the manufacturers and suppliers. I’ve no doubt that Google Fit will make it a lot easier to write apps and develop software initially, but in the medium to long-term you would be tied to Google’s vision of what a health and fitness accessory should be like. If that vision changes, or it diverges from your view as manufacturer, will Google happily let you go your own way, or will you be asked (nicely) to consider how Google see the future?
It also feels like Google is pushing this out at the same time as Apple is pushing their vision of fitness and tracking through Apple HealthKit to try to win hearts and minds of the early software adopters. Once more, a service recently announced (at WWDC), tied into the new version of a mobile operating system (iOS 8), and looking for developer support ahead of the main product launch and consumer push at the end of 2014.
One more, users are going to be asked to decide which competing vision of health they trust.
Samsung Gear Fit (image: Ewan Spence)
Samsung Gear Fit (image: Ewan Spence)
Actually, that’s not even the case. If you are already invested in either iOS or Android you are pretty much locked in to that platform’s vision of health and fitness before you even start. More importantly, you will need to accept that any data captured by the respective platforms will be used in accordance with that platform’s view on customer data.
There will always be independent solutions, but Apple and Google are going to be pushing health heavily this fall on their platforms. They need to capture hardware manufactures, they need to bring developers on board to do interesting things with the data sets. That’s where the battle will be. Not with the end users. As to why it’s not like the majority of them will switch platform because of their heartbeat data. Health is an easy differentiator, but it’s also a weak differentiator. I cannot think of anyone who will switch platforms to follow a specific health software solution.
Still, expect the marketing teams to big up health in the marketing and commercials. It’s easy to explain, and the respective companies are preaching to a captive audience.
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