Getting Started on Android

This guide explains how to start developing with Google Fit on Android.

Note: Google Fit is part of Google Play services. Learn about the benefits your app gets from using Google Play Services.

Setup

Before you start building your app, complete these steps.

Get a Google Account

To use the Google Fit APIs, you need a Google Account. You can create a new account or use an existing account. You may want to create a separate account to test your app from a user's perspective.

Get Google Play services

Get the latest client library for Google Play services on your development host:

1. Open the Android SDK Manager.
2. Under SDK Tools, find Google Play services.
3. If the status for these packages is not Installed, select them both and click Install Packages.

Get an OAuth 2.0 client ID

To enable the Fitness API, get an OAuth 2.0 Client ID.

Create and configure your project

We recommend using the Android Studio development environment to build an app with the Fitness API. Create a new project and configure this project in Android Studio.

Add the Google Play services client library

In Android Studio, open the build.gradle file for your module and add the Google Play services clientlibrary as a dependency:

  
    apply plugin: 'com.android.application'

    ...

    dependencies {
        implementation 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-fitness:20.0.0'
        implementation 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-auth:19.0.0'
    }
  
  

This makes sure that gradle downloads the fitness SDK when building your app automatically.

Build and test your app

Once you've finished the setup steps, you can start building your app. Learn about the types of data your app can store and read. Learn more about working with data in Google Fit.

Get the necessary Android permissions

To read and write some types of data, your app needs to request Android Permissions.

Get OAuth permissions

The data types your app wants access to correspond to authorization scopes. To ask for these permissions, you just need to add which data types your app needs access to in a FitnessOptions instance. When your app asks to use any of the Google Fit data types, the Android SDK automatically checks which scopes they belong to and asks the user for authorization to those scopes.

Create an API client

Create an API client and add the data types your app needs access to, to write and/or read data:

• Sensors Client: Access different sources of health and wellness data from hardware sensors in the local device and in companion devices.
• Recording Client: For low-power, always-on background collection of sensor data.
• History Client: Insert, delete, and read historical data in Google Fit.
• Sessions Client: Create and manage Sessions of user activity.
• Goals Client: Read Heart Point and Steps goals created by users in Google Fit.
• Config Client: Access custom data types and settings in the Google Fit platform.

See an example of how to build a Fitness API client.

Resulting user authorization flow

This is the resulting authorization flow that users will experience when being asked for permissions.

See the user authorization flow

Figure 1.The authorization flow for users.

1. Android permissions: Users see what Android permissions your app has requested before downloading it.
2. Check and connect: Once downloaded, they grant or deny these permissions. Your app checks if permissions were granted before requesting access to other data types.
3. OAuth scopes request: Google prompts the user to grant your app the OAuth scopes needed for the data types it wants to access.
4. Access applied: Your app can access the data types that belong to the scopes the user has granted permission for.

Apply for verification

After you have built and tested your app, you need to apply for verification with different levels of justification needed for sensitive and restricted scopes.