Anyone who straps on the new Fitbit Air and then gets stuck with Google Health as the only way to view their data has, until now, been missing a much friendlier alternative. This week Bevel, a free iOS health app, added the ability to pull data straight out of Google Health, which means an owner of the wearable can effectively skip Google's own app and never open it for anything other than initial setup.
The Fitbit Air itself is a thin, unobtrusive, inexpensive wearable, with the Berry colorway listed at $99.99 on Amazon. But Google Health, its native companion app, has real drawbacks. It pushes multiple paragraphs of AI-generated commentary a day whenever premium features are switched on, and it still lacks something as basic as the ability to look back at yesterday's numbers.
What Bevel actually is
Bevel started out as an iOS app built to read data from Apple Health. Before it dropped its subscription requirement, it functioned mainly as a way to turn an Apple Watch into something that produced Whoop-style recovery and strain metrics. It has since gone free, with only a handful of extra features, such as AI coaching and a biological age estimate, held back for paying users. Beyond Apple Health, Bevel already pulled information from Garmin, Oura and Strava, and Google Health is the newest source it supports.
That expansion is what makes the Fitbit Air workaround possible. The tracker still needs to talk to Google Health to get its readings off the wrist, but nothing says a person has to actually open that app to see the numbers. Once Google Health hands the data to Bevel, all the day-to-day browsing, tracking and logging can happen inside Bevel instead.
The two apps aren't equally equipped, either. Even on its free tier, Bevel includes habit logging, a strength-training feature that records which muscles were worked and whether strength is improving over time, live tracking during workouts, and food logging with barcode scanning. Google Health, by contrast, only allows barcode scanning for people paying for Premium with its AI features switched on.
Setting up Bevel with the Fitbit Air
Google Health doesn't disappear from the process entirely. It still needs to stay installed and configured with the Fitbit Air listed as a connected device, since that's the only route the tracker has to get data off the wearable. Anyone paying for Premium or a Google AI subscription may also want to turn off the Health Coach inside Google Health first, so the constant AI commentary stops showing up as notifications. Notifications shouldn't be switched off completely, though, since that would also block the alert that warns when the Fitbit Air's battery is running low.
With that done, installing Bevel is the next step. Inside the app, going to Settings and then Data Sources brings up an option to tap the plus button next to Integrations and select Google Health. That single step lets Bevel begin pulling in everything Google Health is receiving from the Fitbit Air. Anyone using additional trackers or services can add those the same way, through the same Integrations menu.
What changes once Bevel takes over
A handful of differences stand out once the switch is made
- Any earlier day's metrics can be seen by tapping today's date and picking a past date, something Google Health still doesn't offer.
- Strength workouts can be run directly inside Bevel, complete with a timer for the whole session and for each set and rest period, options to add exercises and log weights and reps, and automatic tracking of which muscles have recently been worked, none of which Google Health provides.
- A status can be set to sick, injured, or taking a break, so the app stops pushing notifications about keeping up a usual activity level.
- Cardio load is shown as a graph of past history alongside a recommended target range, which is easier to read than Google Health's single target number.
- Bevel's coaching is limited to a few lines about how a workout or a night's sleep went, unlike Google Health's long, sometimes inaccurate AI paragraphs.
Bevel's paid tier adds AI-driven coaching and a biological age estimate on top of all this, though those extras sit behind the same kind of subscription wall Google Health uses for its own AI features. Even without paying anything, the free version of Bevel now looks like the more complete way to make sense of data coming off a Fitbit Air, ahead of both the free and paid tiers of Google Health. Since the Google Health integration only went live this week, it's set to become the default way plenty of Fitbit Air owners track their numbers going forward.
