Google Fit preview SDK is live for the developer Community

During Google I/O they talked a little bit about the Google Fit services. The premise is to give users a better way to manage their fitness goals through apps and sensors on devices they might already own. It uses a set of API’s that developers can implement across multiple platforms and wearables to bring all your activity information to one place.

During the conference Google mentioned that a preview SDK for developers would be heading out in the “coming weeks.” Â Those are words we love to hear, but also dread since it is so vague and could mean anything. Luckily the wait for the preview SDK is over though after just about 5 weeks. Google has released the preview in a blog post on their developer blog this morning giving developers some insight into what it is all about and what you can start to do with it.

There are three sets of APIs designed to meet specific developer needs:Â

Sensors APIÂ provides high-level access to sensors from the device and wearablesâ€”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.
Recording APIÂ 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.
History APIÂ 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.

You guys will need the latest Google Play Services that is found in the Android L preview for the Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 though.

Google also goes on to say that developers will be able to fully launch their apps to the Play Store later this year when the full Google Fit SDK is launched as part of the Google Play Services for handsets, Android Wear and the web.

Below is the Google I/O conference video. If you want to catch up on Google Fit and get a little reminder of what it is all about, jump to time stamp 2:19:00.