Google makes Fit, its activity tracker, available on iOS as a standalone app with full Health integration
Last August, Google Fit was completely revamped with the Material Theme and a focus on two new metrics. The health and activity tracking application is now coming to iOS with full Apple Health integration.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Fit has been rebuilt twice on its way to the iPhone: a visual redesign with improved goals in 2016, then the 2018 relaunch around "move minutes" and "heart points" that reframed the app around cardiac exercise rather than step counts. A 2017 update had already wired Calendar to both Google Fit and Apple Health, signaling that Google was comfortable living inside Apple's health stack before committing to a native client.
First-order effects
- iPhone users can now run Google Fit as a standalone app and sync activity bidirectionally with Apple Health, giving Google a direct presence on the platform where Apple's own Activity rings are preinstalled.
Second-order effects
- Google doubles down on feature parity across platforms — within months the iOS app picks up route maps for workouts alongside detailed sleep logging and a dark theme rolling out to both operating systems.
Third-order effects
- The cross-platform bet ultimately gets unwound at the brand level: Google announces it will shut down Fit by the end of 2026 and rebrand Fitbit as Google Health (per VP Rishi Chandra), folding seven years of multi-platform health tracking into a single consolidated product line.
The trend: Consumer health apps spent the late 2010s racing to aggregate data across rival platforms, only for their owners to later consolidate those efforts under single first-party brands.