27 Mar Google Fit vs. Apple Health: Who’s Winning The Race?
Despite high-profile launches, these core apps are still trailing the field.
The number of fronts where Apple and Google are battling directly seems to grow with each passing month: desktop OSes, mobile OSes, digital assistants, cloud-based office apps, smartwatches, maps, and so on and so on.
Health apps and their underlying platforms have been on that list since last fall. Google Fit turned up with Android 5.0 Lollipop, and Apple Health—with its HealthKit API—arrived just after iOS 8.
A few months on, it’s worth revisiting how these apps and platforms are faring, as well as how they could grow further beyond the launch of the Apple Watch. Are either of them ready for action?
Data Collecting
Despite a flurry of partnership announcements at launch, neither Apple nor Google have made much headway as far as third-party apps and devices are concerned. There are some supported data sources, but they can be limited and unreliable based on the testing we’ve done and reports from users.
Jawbone’s Up app, for example, can link directly to Apple Health but not Google Fit. It can also connect to the tracking app Runkeeper, though only on iOS (Android integration is coming soon). For its part, RunKeeper is one of few apps that can pipe data into both Apple Health and Google Fit.