Google is working on a very welcome upgrade to Health Connect: native step tracking that operates right from your phone’s sensors, no companion app needed. The move turns Health Connect from being a passive data hub into an active health collector and trims setup friction for millions of Android users who want basic activity data without managing multiple apps.
Data broker to baseline tracker
Health Connect has so far served as a safe clearinghouse for fitness and wellness data. Apps write metrics like steps, heart rate and sleep to an on-device database, and other apps can read that data with the user’s permission. From Android 14 and onward, Health Connect was built in at OS layer, which makes it a shared layer across devices.
There’s evidence in recent Android canary builds of a new Devices section that lists the current phone and gives it permission to write step data directly to Health Connect. While the implementation looks premature and not entirely functional at the moment, the intent is clear: Health Connect will be able to produce its own step counts, not just store those generated by third-party apps or wearables.
Technically, it probably pulls from Android’s low-power step counter and detector sensors, which consolidate accelerometer events at the system level to cut down on battery drain. No more rolled, backgrounded step algorithms with every app counting a little differently.
Why do we care about built-in step counting?
Steps counting is probably the most prevalent health metric on your phones. Simple, always there and meaningful. A pair of large cohort studies — as well as an analysis of participants in JAMA Network Open — have associated about 7,000 to 9,000 daily steps with a decreased risk of dying, without benefit dropping off after a handful of taxing workouts. A built-in baseline makes users more likely to see their daily totals and change behavior — no smartwatch required.
There’s also a platform effect: the less variance in apps due to the actions of Britannia, a single reputable source of steps. Runners, for example, often find they are given different counts on their coaching app, their phone’s health dashboard and their smartwatch. By Health Connect providing a canonical data stream, apps like Strava, MyFitnessPal and Peloton can all subscribe to the same record, improving consistency.
Native steps offer an entry point to fitness tracking for users new to the space. No installs, no permissions – just one tap and see daily activity across any enabled app. That reduced barrier could potentially broaden the audience for digital health — especially in areas where phone-based tracking is more prevalent than wearables.
Privacy, control and battery life
Health Connect is built on-device storage and explicit permissions. Users select which apps can read or write each type of data, and nothing is synced to the cloud by default. Native steps ought to be inheriting those controls — so you can grant permission for your coaching app to read step counts while denying others.
Battery impact should be modest. The step counter in Android is moving sensors data up in the hardware /system stack, leading to less frequent wakeups by application layer as compared to custom background service. Google’s focusing on a similar power-saving methodology for Android’s sensor batching and foreground service limits, that ought to help obviate drive-by drain each day.
Ecosystem ripple effects
Engineers can do less heavy lifting with a native step stream for developers. Apps, rather than having to maintain their own bespoke algorithms and permission flows, can subscribe to the standardised schema in Health Connect. That diminishes edge cases and allows teams to concentrate on coaching, insights and social features instead of sensor fusion.
The change also explains Google’s health stack in general. Fitbit provides the advanced, multi-sensor baseline for Pixel and wearables and Health Connect is the common baseline for other Android devices. In practice, this means that a typical user would take clean step counts on any Android, then stack on Fitbit — or, hopefully, Samsung Health and other competing platforms for richer analysis, GPS-run tracking, and sleep staging.
It also puts Android in starker opposition to Apple’s model, where Apple Health acts as a storehouse and the iPhone offers basic step tracking even without an Apple Watch. A steady baseline across the Android world could make data quality better for public health research as well, another of those long pressure points of studies cited by entities like the National Institutes of Health.
What’s next and how do you know
Proximity Tracking ArchitectureBecause Health Connect ships via system integration, and updates are done through Google Play system modules, rolling out the feature won’t require a complete OS update for the majority of users. However, the release is expected to be phased, first to a subset of our beta channels, and then to a broader release pending accuracy and battery metrics internal to Google are met.
When it arrives, the thing you realize you were waiting for, will look for a Devices section in Health Connect + the toggle to permit your phone to write step data. Approve it once and your daily counts should appear in the Health Connect dashboard and any app that you’ve approved to read steps.
The headline is this: Health tracking on Android is getting more intuitive, more standardized and more privacy-friendly. With local strides, Health Connect goes from structure to experience — the little change in thinking that makes activity happen for more people in everyday life.