Google Is Rebranding the Fitbit App to ‘Google Health’

More than a decade since its debut and five years after Google acquired it, the Fitbit app is officially rebranding as Google Health. As part of the transition, Google also announced plans to sunset the 12-year-old Google Fit app later this year, though details about migrating user data to Google Health will be released in the coming months.

Google introduced a dramatic redesign of the Fitbit app last year in public beta, centered around a new AI-powered Health Coach chatbot that can provide guidance on anything and everything from your health to fitness, even parse your medical records. Now, the Health Coach is officially exiting beta. Fitbit users will see an app update on May 19 that rebrands the Fitbit app into Google Health.

“The investment we've been making the last few years is literally designed for this one moment,” Rishi Chandra, Google's vice president for health and home, tells WIRED.

The new Google Health app will be an app update for anyone using the existing Fitbit app.

Courtesy of Google Health

Despite the app's name change, Chandra says the Fitbit brand is still very much part of Google's playbook: The company announced the first new Fitbit in three years, the Fitbit Air, which you can read more about here. Designed as a screenless health tracker that's ultra-lightweight and comfortable to wear, it debuts alongside the new Google Health app with simplicity at its core. Anyone—a kid, adult, or an elderly person—can easily understand the data the device produces.

“That tying together of this wearable technology with the coaching experience is what's been missing for the longest time, so candidly, we were waiting for the Coach to be ready before we launch new hardware," he says. “Now we have the Coach, you should expect to see more hardware coming.”

The Google Health app is designed to be the one-stop shop for all your health and fitness needs. It supports Health Connect and Apple's HealthKit platform, meaning anyone with an Apple Watch can use the Google Health app to parse their data. If you buy the new $100 Fitbit Air, Google plans to make it so the device's data can be viewed in Apple Health as well, though this won't be available at launch.

The app allows you to upload medical records—you can search for your doctor's name or address and log in to the provider's portal, which will mean historical and future records will sync to Google Health. Plus, you can log anything you want through the Health Coach, whether that's what you ate for lunch to track nutrition, or if you broke your leg and want to reconfigure your weekly fitness regimen. Chandra says the app is designed to be shareable, allowing you to share health data with family, friends, or a physician.

Speaking of friends, Google removed many of Fitbit's social features a few years ago, like Challenges—where you could compete on a few fitness metrics with friends connected through the app—but the new Google Health app restores some of those old capabilities. You can connect with friends and set challenges based on things like step count or cardio load. “We plan to expand that capability over time, but we do think that's an important part of the accountability of health,” he says.

The Health Coach is a big part of the app, but it's also a subscriber-only feature. Anyone can use the Google Health app for free, and if you have a Fitbit device or Pixel Watch, you can continue to see your activity, sleep, and health-tracking data. But if you want deeper sleep insights, adaptive fitness plans, proactive insights, and access to the Health Coach, you'll have to cough up $10 per month ($100 per year) for Google Health Premium, which is included for anyone subscribed to Google One's AI Pro and AI Ultra subscription plans.

Anyone can view sleep data in the Google Health app, but for deeper sleep insights and access to the Health Coach, you'll need to subscribe to Google Health Premium.

Courtesy of Google Health

The Health Coach is powered by Google's Gemini models, though the data this model is trained on is “grounded in science,” with a Consumer Health Advisory Panel providing feedback and guidance. However, a common problem with large-language model chatbots is that they “hallucinate,” or make things up. Google's Health Coach isn't immune to this problem; Chandra says that some users have complained about this during the public preview.

“This will be a long-term thing we're going to tackle with our consumers of making sure we're obviously building something that is based on science. We have evals to make sure from safety requirement standpoints in health [that] we're giving safe advice for consumers. It's not perfect by any means, but we've made huge improvements along the way,” Chandra says. “We're not in the business of diagnosing or replacing a doctor, and our responses are architected to make that clear to users."

One caveat is that at launch, the Health Coach only supports data derived from Fitbit and Pixel Watch devices, but Chandra says the plan is to support a wider set of devices later in the year. “Even the Health Coach is not going to be exclusive to Fitbit or Pixel Watch hardware," he says. "We want to broaden it to as many devices as possible; we want the Coach to work wherever you are, so if you have an Apple Watch, great—we want to make sure we can support you there.”

The new Google Health app includes a host of other improvements, such as the ability to personalize dashboards how you see fit, customize key metrics with weekly targets, and even follow your workouts with step-by-step instructions. Sleep tracking can now detect naps, and the app still lets you connect to “hundreds” of third-party apps, like those from Nike, Peloton, and more. Google says many of these features are built from direct user feedback—the company had more than 500,000 users in the public preview of the redesigned Fitbit app last year and received more than 1 million feedback submissions.

While Google has taken its time to get to this moment with Google Health, Apple has been adding to its Health app over the last few years, introducing features like the ability to store and share medications, sync medical records with your preferred health care institution, hearing health features, and even adding additional apps to its Health portfolio like Vitals.

As part of Google's acquisition of Fitbit, the company was not allowed to use Fitbit health data for Google Ads, and Fitbit user data must be siloed, separated from other Google data used for advertising. That's still the case here, even with the transition to Google Health, and the company says there's an opt-in if you want your data used for research and development and model training.

The new Google Health app rolls out May 19 for Android and iOS, and the Fitbit Air, available for preorder today, launches on May 26.