Fitbit Now Syncs With Apple Health

This is just one other example of how Apple’s walled garden sucks for users and why it’s good governments like the EU are starting to break it apart

It’s also one reason Apple cozied up to the fascist regime in the whitehouse: they get special treatment and freedom from any kind of regulation or scrutiny just as long as they support fascism

Isn’t that sickening?

Sounds to me like this is just the Health app de-duping the step count collected from iPhone with the one from Fitbit. I don't think Apple Health would deliberate suppress data from a specific source.

If you want to prioritize data from Google Health, you can do that in the Health app. Go to Steps > Data Source & Access > Edit. Then drag the Google Health/Fitbit source to the top of the list.

@Max In this case, it's not Apple, but other vendors, such as Fitbit and Peloton, wanting to have their own walled garden for their data. All Health data on iPhone is accessible (behind a TCC prompt) for import and export to any app. It has nothing to do with fascism and all to do with revenue and monetary incentives.

@Michael If you both use iPhones, you can compare your steps in the Health or the Fitness apps, which draw their data from the HK data store. So once synced, they should be comparable, iff the step measuring algorithms match, of course.

@Léo Yes, my understanding is that the delay was Fitbit/Google’s choice. I’m skeptical that having their own walled garden actually benefited them. If it did, what changed so that it no longer does?

Yes, we can compare steps with our phones side-by-side, but we wanted a shared leaderboard like the Fitbit app offers. I wasn’t able to see what the Health app offers because the sharing feature didn’t work. But after some searching it looks like Health doesn’t actually show the counts on the same screen; it just gives you additional individual feeds. So that’s not very useful. I guess the answer is a third-party app that sends the data to the cloud…

@Michael I think the sharing aspects are more of the Fitness app's domain, including sending challenges to other people. I'm not sure how well that works with imported data vs. data collected by, say, an Apple Watch, but at least in the UI, it looks like it should work. But your wife would have to step out of the Fitbit app world, which may not work with the extended friend group, which may not all be using iOS, or willing to move to another app.

Like with all walled gardens, it's always a function of benefit to keep vs benefit to open (or at least what some asshole product manager believes). Fitness equipment manufacturers see a benefit from having the data only in their app because it creates a mental lock-in. All your achievements and stats from years of usage are in the Peloton app's database. That's a big barrier for many people to switch to a different fitness hardware/services maker if they have to start with fresh stats and achievements. I have no idea what changed to make Google or Fitbit implement the sync. It could be that they shrunk and think opening up will bring them most customers (since an Apple Watch user can now have continuity with a Fitbit device), or some product manager likes the Apple Fitness app and managed to push this policy in. It's hard to know with these companies. But from my looking into health devices, it is actually rare that to see syncing with Apple Health, despite the APIs being there for a very very long time.

I installed Google Health to see what insights it could put together from my Apple Health data - I gave it only read access, because I frankly don’t trust Google to not overwrite my data with crap. Despite reporting a successful initial sync and many subsequent ones, no data ever showed up.

Call me a cynic, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the app refuses to show data unless it has write access too.