Newsletter
Google Fit, which is Google’s app for tracking your fitness and activity throughout the day – mainly through an Android Wear smartwatch, but it can also be done with your smartphone – has just gotten a pretty minimal update. There’s not much new here in terms of functionality, but there are a few changes to the UI. Best of all, there are some hints as to what may be coming soon to the app. Something that’s always fun to see.
The only major visual change seen here is in the “Add Activity” screen. Instead of having tabs at the top of the screen for the duration, calories, steps and miles for each activity you’ve done. It’s now all listed on one screen. Making it a bit more user intuitive. Now in the teardown of the new APK for version 1.59, it appears that there are some new cards on the way. The teardown doesn’t show exactly what is coming, but just that there are more cards coming. Additionally, there is said to be some support for new activity types. These include housework, sailing, snowmobiling, team sports and treadmill. These aren’t actually active yet, but should be coming soon, as the code is already available.
There’s also talk about a new graph that will show your recent sleep patterns. Like Fitbit, Jawbone and other fitness trackers, Google Fit does also track your sleep – of course that is only if you are wearing your smartwatch while you sleep. And this new graph is going to show you how you’ve slept recently. So you can see what days you slept well, and which days weren’t so good. There are also some improvements to auto-detected activities, and even a pop up asking if the auto-detected activity was correct. This way you won’t need to manually put in every exercise or activity that you do throughout the day.
Google Fit v1.59 is now available on the Google Play Store, of course if you don’t want to wait for the staged rollout to hit your device, you can sideload it using the link below. Just make sure that “Unknown Sources” are enabled and you’ll be good to go.
Download: Google Fit v1.59