Google Health sucks | Joe Baldwin

Warning: This post contains some sexual swear words

About two months ago, I switched from Apple Watch (and iOS entirely) to Android and a Pixel Watch in order to use the Fitbit, unified view of nutrition versus activity that the Apple Watch lacked, properly integrated food logging, did not have arbitrary goals, and was a cohesive, friendly experience in comparison to the Apple Health app.

I even said in that blog post, “I honestly am a little apprehensive about trusting Google again with a wearable, after some very bad experiences with the first two Pixel Watches.”

I was right to be apprehensive, because just over a month and a half after I switched, Google took the Fitbit app out behind the shed and shot it.

In Fitbit’s place is a “new” app, called Google Health. And Google Health is fucking terrible. Literally all the reasons that I gave for switching they have unceremoniously got rid of. I hate it, and I hate them.

They got rid of the food plan thing#

Literally the entire reason behind me using Fitbit is the Food Plan. To wit; Fitbit has your calories in and calories out, as well as what your target caloric deficit is. It uses this to predict a “remaining budget” which tells you how much (more) food you can eat while still remaining within your caloric goal. It was completely unique, and a killer app for the ecosystem in my view.

Google unceremoniously binned the Food Plan feature with the Google Health app. Now, you’re asked to set a “calorie target” of between fixed amounts a day. This has no reference to your actual activity, and does not adjust if (e.g.) you exercise more or less than you usually do.

So now the feature just doesn’t exist, except for one app, that I made, called Budgie Diet, that I expressly discontinued because I was going to use Fitbit instead, and now can’t use because I don’t have an iPhone, to use the food plans. Great. Fuck you, Google.

You can’t even see a simple graph of calories in vs. calories out any more. Simple question - why?

They also broke food logging#

Another cool feature of Fitbit that I specifically highlighted in my earlier post was the ability to log “quick calories”, rather than creating full new food entries for things, or just being able to input the name of a food item and the total calories to create custom foods that you can re-use later.

Can you do that in Google Health? Nope! Gone. You can’t add any foods. You can add manual calories, but only by talking to the AI Coach (more on this later - spoilers, it makes me the angriest I’ve ever been at any consumer product in my life), which Google hilariously presents as a benefit (“You’re no longer limited to manual typing and barcode scanning” - yes, because you removed both of those things entirely!)

Can you see a list of foods that you’ve recently logged, so as to re-log them quickly? Nope! Gone.

So now, while the food logging is technically still better than Apple Health (in the sense that there is at least a food database), this is rather like saying unicycling to work is better than having both of your legs broken. And I am now functionally in the same position as I was previously (at least before I wrote Budgie Diet) where I have to have a third party app, and all of them just suck, only some less than others. Great stuff.

“Cardio Load” makes no sense#

I simply do not understand this as a metric or how I can act upon it. I don’t understand how the targets are calculated, I don’t understand what activities will feed into it, I don’t understand literally any part of it whatsoever and I do not want it. Active Zone Minutes were simple and comprehensible - you do a minute of exercise, you get a point or multiple points for that minute depending on your heart rate. What the hell is “cardio load”?

One of my criticisms of the Apple Watch was that the active calorie “Move goal” was a blunt, arbitrary instrument without a reason given to meet it. This is worse because at least I can understand that if I burn 600 calories and my goal was 600 I have met the goal. What is a “cardio load point” and how do I achieve it?

The “AI Coach” can just fuck off#

This is going to be a long rant. Because no feature in any software product - any product, actually - has filled me with more bilious anger than the AI Coach that Google has sharted into the Google Health app. I actually can’t come up with a more polite way to phrase this than the heading above.

I have a rather prosaic view on “AI” which is this; useful things are useful. Using energy, data centres, water, whatever is fine in exchange for a useful output. Many good, useful things consume all those inputs. But the catch is that the outputs do actually have to be useful. Most consumer-facing AI...