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The new Google Health app starts rolling out today, replacing the Fitbit app for data tracking on Fitbit and Pixel Watch devices. It’s what the Fitbit “Public Preview” previewed, and now, the finished app is live.
The final app is definitely better than the preview, but still has its problems—here’s what I’ve noticed so far. (By the way, to get the Google Health app, you don’t have to do anything—just wait, and the upgrade will come to you sometime over the next week or so.)
How Google Health differs from the Fitbit app
The new Google Health app, with its watercolor rainbow heart, replaces the Fitbit app. Some Fitbit features will be lost forever (no more sleep animals!), social features are limited, and everything runs off your Google account, rather than a standalone Fitbit account.
The best features are still paywalled
As with the Fitbit app, there’s still a divide between what you get on a free account versus what you can access if you’ve paid for the Premium tier:
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Everybody gets step tracking, exercise tracking, and sleep scores.
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As with Fitbit Premium, you’ll need Google Health Premium to see detailed sleep data and access the workout library and mindfulness session library.
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Google Health Premium is now required for some features that were free in the Public Preview, including the ability to chat with the AI coach and have it create personalized fitness plans.
A Premium subscription is $9.99/month, or $99.99/year. When you pair a new Fitbit or Pixel device (including the new Fitbit Air), you’ll be offered a three-month free trial.
Yep, the AI still hallucinates
Google seems to have tamed the hallucinations that plagued the AI coach at launch (remember when it didn’t believe me when I told it the Pixel Watch 4 exists?)…but only somewhat. For example, today I see a message on my screen congratulating me on a sleep score of 99, but when I tap into my sleep stats, I see that my score was actually 85.
In the Preview, the coach kept “notes” that you could individually delete if it seemed to be constantly harping on something that was no longer relevant. I eventually got so frustrated with it that I deleted everything. The new version of the app has a chat history instead of memories, and conversations now seem to be a little more relevant to what I’ve told the chatbot recently.
There’s still a lot that I find less than satisfying, though. The bot interprets everything I say to it as a request for a condescending lecture. Sometimes it links to what seems like a source, but the links are often irrelevant to the conversation. Once, it linked a Reddit thread asking a similar question I had just asked—but the only answer in that thread was somebody saying, “Here, I’ll paste the answer I got from ChatGPT.” It’s chatbots all the way down.
Logging things with the Google Health Coach is pretty convenient
One nice feature of the Google Health Coach is that you can use it to log the food you’ve eaten, or exercise you’ve done, just by telling it—though as with any AI-based nutrition logging, the exact calories and macros it generates for you will be a guess. Still, for common food items, it should be close enough. For example, I told it I had a carne asada burrito from Trader Joe’s, and it logged it as 460 calories and 25 grams of protein. According to the label, the burrito has 490 calories and 22 grams of protein—not exact, but fairly close.
You can also record exercise by uploading a screenshot from another app, with mixed results (it correctly counted my heart rate zone minutes from a workout I tested, but didn’t update my weekly cardio load). You can even use a photo of a written workout from, say, your gym’s whiteboard, and it should work.
The Coach will ask appropriate follow-up questions—how long did that whiteboard workout take? Do you want to adjust the serving size of the food?—though sometimes it misses details, like logging “1 rep” of a sled push instead of the listed 50 yards. But if you’re looking for convenience over accuracy, it’s good enough.
