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Google Fit preview SDK now available to download

Almost two months back at I/O, Google formally announced its new Google Fit health tracking platform. With support from partners like Addidas and Nike, Mountain View said that it would soon release a preview SDK for developers and today the company has made good on its word. Outlined in a blog post by Angana Ghosh, Product Manager, Google Fit, the platform provides devs with a single set of APIs for apps and device manufacturers to store and access activity data from fitness software and sensors on Android and wearables.

After obtaining user permission developers can tailor their apps to provide people with more personalized experiences. Google Fit’s setup breaks down into three sets of APIs:

  1. Sensors API provides high-level access to sensors from the device and wearables—so with one API your app can talk to sensors, whether on an Android device or a wearable. So if you’re making a running app, you could register it to receive updates from a connected heart rate monitor every 5 seconds during a user’s run and give immediate feedback to the runner on the display.

  2. Recording API allows apps to register for battery-efficient, cloud-synced background collection of fitness data. For example, a running app could ask to store user’s location so it can map the run later. Once it registers for these data types, collection is done by Fit in the background with no further work needed by the app.

  3. History API allows operations on the data like read, insert and delete. When the exerciser finishes her run, the running app can query the History API for all locations during the run and show a map.

After setting up the SDK, devs can start creating applications today and sharing ideas with the new Google Fit developer community on Google+.

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