As promised, Google releases its Fit Preview SDK

During the Google I/O keynote in June we heard a little bit about Google’s plans for expanding their efforts towards fitness with the introduction of the Google Fit platform. At the time all we knew for sure was that the platform would be able to tap into sensors and other data collected by our phones and wearables, with developers being able to take this information and use it for their apps.

Google also announced several companies like Nike and Adidas were partnering for the effort, and promised we’d see a preview of the SDK in “coming weeks”. True to its word, Google has now released the preview SDK to developers, providing a set of APIs that allow developers to take fitness-related applications to a whole new level.

Here’s a description of the three APIs, as provided by Google in its developer’s blog:

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.

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.

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.

For more details on the API, you’ll want to head over to Google’s developer page. Also keep in mind that Google has now released a new build of Android L that adds support for the Google Fit platform. For those that aren’t developers, the new Google Fit SDK really does nothing for you immediately, though it opens up the doors to much smarter apps that better utilize our sensors in the future.

from Android Authority http://ift.tt/1pZxQ1T