Newsletter
Google’s greatest product is its services, and they’ve only continued to enhance those over the years. While the big event at Google I/O 2014 was no doubt products in the realm of Android L and the many different forms of Android coming to the market soon, services continued to dominate more than half of what was talked about at I/O today. Google Fit is the latest in the huge number of services that Google offers, and it fills a section of the market that has done nothing but explode in the past couple of years. We saw rumors for the past few weeks about Google launching a fitness aggregation service to help unify all your personal fitness data so that apps could access it without having to build their own data repositories, and that’s exactly what Google is doing with Google Fit.
Google Fit is a place where your fitness information such as daily steps counted, current weight and weight loss goals and more can be stored, and apps can then access and modify that information as needed. This means that you can use your favorite app, such as the Nike Fuelband app that was recently launched for Android, to use all the data you’ve already accumulated over the years and track it from there. So let’s say you decide to ditch Nike Fuelband a little ways down the road and pick up some other fitness tracker that does something differently than Nike offers. The best part about Google Fit is that you won’t lose your information when moving to a different fitness hardware or software platform since Google Fit integrates nicely into each fitness app.
Obviously apps will have to be rebuilt to support the cloud storage offered by Google here, but it’s being presented as a simple option by Google to developers of such apps. Cloud storage isn’t anything new to Google, and I/O 2014 has only pushed the boundaries of what cloud storage means to a whole new level.
