Fabio Manganiello#Google is shutting down one more service that was actually useful - the #Fit API.
A few years ago I wrote an article that showed how to create a custom #Grafana dashboard that, among the other things, could leverage #Platypush and its google.fit integration to collect and display health data from any device that supported Google Fit (phones, watches, scales, custom health monitors etc.).
Since Google Fit never even bothered to implement a proper Web view outside of their mobile app, it was a great way to collect all of your fit data under the same umbrella.
All these efforts, and thousands of apps and hardware devices that built their health/fit capabilities around the Fit API, are now likely to be washed away like tears in the rain - and all, again, because Google is stuck in an existential crisis and a masochistic spiral of layoffs, cuts and mass divesting.
Unfortunately the deprecation of the Fit API will leave a huge hole in the market.
I surely didn’t use the Fit API because I like Google. I used it because it’s the backend supported by basically anything out there that tracks sleep or workouts, or measures steps, weight, calories or pulse.
I wish that open products like #wger were a bit more mature and supported by more hardware makers and app developers. Or that #Nextcloud Health had a proper API that one could tap in. But that’s not the case. Google Fit has been for a while the lingua franca in this niche.
Divesting from Google and whatever they build and sell is imperative at this point.
Google by now fully deserves its reputation as a reverse king Midas that turns everything it touches into shit.
And we need to make sure that from now on the infrastructure to collect and aggregate fit data is based on open protocols that all the vendors in the field are supposed to adopt.
We can’t rely on a mediocre company led by a mediocre and shortsighted management class that keeps pushing whole fields in our industry back by a decade and keeps turning existing devices into silicon garbage with a snap of their fingers, rounds of layoffs and corporate bullshit.
Google is likely to be in less than a decade in the same position where Philips is now.
A sleepy giant that has wasted all the chances it had of nurturing and following up on all the brilliant ideas of their engineers.
A place that sucks the lymph out of talented engineers and leaves behind empty shells with no professional purpose.
A business that was in the right place at the right time, and had many chances of remaining both competitive, innovative and fair, but failed them all because of a shortsighted management class that sees everything as a cost to cut on the altar of the shareholders.
Eventually, companies like these become walking zombies with no purpose, struggling to put together even the most basic products, kept alive solely by the reminiscence of their past prestige, and just waiting for the last employee to cash in their pension and stocks package and turn off the lights on their way out.
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