Why Bevel is a better app for Fitbit Air than Google Health

This Fitbit Air It is Really nice wearable-It is thin, natural, cheap. But its app, Google Health, has a problem. It feeds you paragraphs of AI-generated text several times a day As long as you have premium features turned onAnd it’s missing simple things like the ability to see your stats from yesterday. Fortunately, the iPhone app Bevel is now compatible with Google Health, which means you can replace the app entirely.

What is a bevel?

Credit: Beth Skwerki, Bevel

Bevel is an iOS app that reads health and fitness data from Apple Health, and Back when it was subscription-onlyI thought of it as an app that uses your Apple Watch to give you the metrics you’d normally get from Hoop. But bevel is Free to use these daysWith only a few add-on features behind a paywall. And it can pull data directly from Garmin, Aura, Strava, or now, Google Health. That means you can wear your Fitbit Air, bypass its native app (Google Health) and instead browse your health data and track your workouts through Bevel.

Unlike Google Health, Bevel has habit logging, a strength training feature that keeps track of which muscles you’ve worked and whether you’re getting stronger, live activities for workouts, and food logging that includes barcode scanning, even on the free tier. Meanwhile, Google Health can only scan barcodes with a Premium subscription and AI enabled.

How to use Bevel with your Fitbit Air

To get the best of both worlds, you still need to have the Google Health app installed. Make sure it’s set up as a connected device to your Fitbit Air. If you have a premium or Google AI subscription, you’ll want to Close the health coach So you stop getting that constant commentary from the coach. (You can turn off notifications entirely, but then you’ll miss out on your Fitbit Air telling you that your battery is running low.)

Next, install the bevel. To get Fitbit Air data, go to settings And then Data sources. Tap the plus button next to it Integrationand choose Google Health. This will allow Bevel to pull data from Google Health, which it receives from the Fitbit Air. If you use other devices, you can add them here as well.

What do you get with Bevel?

Cardio load as reported by Google Health (left) and Bevel (right).
Credit: Beth Skwerki

Here are some things I like about using the Bevel app instead of Google Health:

• You can view metrics from the previous day by tapping on today’s date and then selecting any date in the past—something Google Health is still missing.

• You can do strength workouts in the app. Bevel will give you a timer for the entire workout and for each set and rest; It will let you add exercises and log weights and reps; And it will keep track of which muscles you’ve used recently. Google is having none of that.

• You can change your status to sick, injured, or “taking a break” if you don’t want to be bothered to maintain your normal activity level.

• Cardio load is presented in a way that’s much easier to understand with a graph of your past history and a recommended window, rather than Google’s single target.

• Unlike Google’s long and often confusing paragraphs, Bevel’s “coaching” is limited to a few lines of text commenting on how your workout went or how you slept.

Bevel offers a premium tier with AI coaching and estimates your “biological age”, which I haven’t tried. But overall, I find the free tier to be a better way to view data from the Fitbit Air than Google’s free. Or Premium levels. The integration between Bevel and Google Health is new this week, and I think that will be my preferred way of using the Fitbit Air going forward.