Google Health review: Fitbit's successor is ambitious and surprisingly good

Google's new Health app combines fitness tracking, AI coaching and medical records into one platform, though it occasionally prioritises lengthy explanations over quick, glanceable insights

Fitness apps have worked in the same way for most of the time I remember. You open the app, glance at your sleep score, check how many steps you've walked, maybe look at your heart rate graph, and move on. Occasionally, you'd get a suggestion to walk a little more or sleep a little earlier, but the numbers always came first.

 

Google revamped Health wants to flip that idea on its head.

 

The company has now retired the Fitbit app and replaced it with Google Health, a platform that isn't just interested in tracking your health, but interpreting it. Instead of simply telling you that you slept six hours, it tries to explain why you feel tired. Instead of recommending a workout, it builds one around your goals, recovery and schedule. Instead of becoming another dashboard full of graphs, it wants to become an AI-powered health companion.

 

 

I've been using Google Health on the Pixel 10a paired with the Pixel Watch 3 for the past week to see whether that approach actually works. While I also tried the app on an iPhone 17 out of curiosity, most of my experience comes from Google's own ecosystem.

 

And after spending some time with it, I've realised Google has built one of the most ambitious health apps I've used in a while. The problem is that, in trying so hard to explain everything, it occasionally forgets that sometimes all people want is a simple graph.

It looks better than Fitbit. It doesn't always feel better.

The redesign is probably the easiest thing to like.

 

Compared to the old Fitbit app, everything feels far more modern. Colours are brighter, cards animate into view, graphs feel more alive, and the interface no longer carries the slightly clinical look that Fitbit had for years. It feels less like opening a spreadsheet and more like opening a modern consumer app.

 

Google has also reorganised everything into four dedicated sections: Today, Fitness, Sleep and Health.

 

It sounds like a small change, but it makes navigation much easier. Sleep finally gets its own dedicated page instead of being buried among everything else, while the Health tab becomes the home for heart rate, blood oxygen, skin temperature variation, respiratory rate and other long-term metrics.

 

For the most part, finding information is easier than before. Ironically, reading that information isn't.

 

Almost every time I opened the app, I was greeted by a long paragraph from Health Coach before I could properly look at my own data. The numbers are still there, but they're wrapped inside explanations that often occupy more screen space than the actual metrics.

That's where I think Google has slightly misunderstood why people open health apps. When I check my health data in the morning, I don't immediately want an AI interpretation of why my readiness score dropped overnight. I first want to see the readiness score. I want the graph. I want to compare it with yesterday. Only after that do I care about the explanation.

 

Here, the order feels reversed.

 

That's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, for someone new to fitness tracking, those explanations can be genuinely helpful. But for anyone who's been wearing a smartwatch for a while, the graphs usually tell the story much faster than paragraphs ever could.

Health Coach is surprisingly good

The AI overload becomes much easier to forgive once you actually start using Health Coach.

 

I'll admit I was fairly sceptical going in. AI coaching sounds like one of those features that looks great during a keynote but quietly disappears from your routine after a week.

 

That wasn't really my experience.

 

During setup, Health Coach asks about your goals, preferred workout schedule, available equipment and even injuries that could affect your training. What surprised me was that it doesn't simply agree with everything you tell it.

 

When I deliberately picked a workout frequency that felt slightly unrealistic, the Coach pushed back and suggested something more manageable instead of blindly accepting it. It's a small interaction, but one that immediately made the system feel less like a chatbot and more like an actual coach.

 

Once everything is configured, it starts building weekly workout plans around those goals.

 

Unlike traditional fitness recommendations that simply suggest random exercises every day, these plans actually feel connected. One workout leads into the next, recovery days are planned in advance, and the recommendations adapt based on how much strain your body has already gone through.

 

Rather than simply counting workouts, the app measures how demanding your recent activity has been and uses that information to decide whether today should be another hard session or a lighter recovery day. In practice, it makes the recommendations feel much more personalised than simply chasing activity rings or step counts.

 

The Health Coach is also very flexible, if you're travelling, feeling unwell or simply know you won't make it to the gym that week, you can ask the Health Coach to adjust the schedule. Instead of making you manually rebuild everything, it simply reshuffles the workouts or removes them altogether before creating a new plan around your updated availability.

 

The notifications also deserve credit. Normally, health apps tend to send generic reminders that quickly become background noise. Here, they often feel contextual.

After a few consecutive days of fairly intense activity, the app encouraged me to take it easy rather than pushing for another workout. Later that evening, it acknowledged the recovery day before preparing me for the following day's session with reminders to stay hydrated and get enough sleep.

 

You can also chat directly with the Health Coach whenever you want more context around your health data. Whether it's understanding why your readiness score dropped, asking how to improve recovery or requesting changes to your weekly plan, the conversations feel focused on your own health history rather than generic fitness advice. In many cases, the Coach also includes links to supporting sources, which adds a little more confidence to the recommendations instead of expecting you to blindly trust the AI.

Can Google Health replace every other health app

One thing became pretty clear after using Google Health for a week: Google isn't trying to build a better Fitbit. It's trying to build the one app you open for everything related to your health. Whether that's tracking workouts, logging meals, storing medical records or simply asking questions about your sleep, Google wants it all to happen inside a single app.

 

It's an ambitious goal, and surprisingly, it's closer than I expected.

 

Food logging is probably the feature I was most curious about because it's something that activity tracking apps are not really good at.

 

Google gives you multiple ways to log a meal. You can type what you ate, snap a picture of your food, or simply scan the barcode on packaged products. The image recognition is genuinely impressive. During my testing, the app usually recognised meals correctly from a photo alone, and barcode scanning was just as quick.

 

The issue isn't identifying the food. It's understanding how much of it you're actually eating.

 

There were multiple occasions where the app correctly identified the ingredients in a meal but underestimated the nutritional values, particularly protein. Barcode scanning wasn't perfect either. While products were recognised almost instantly, the nutritional information occasionally differed from what was printed on the packaging.

 

If you're casually tracking what you eat, this probably won't bother you. But if you're trying to hit specific calorie or protein targets, those small inaccuracies start adding up.

 

Thankfully, Google Health already supports syncing with third party apps such as MyFitnessPal, so you can continue logging meals there while still keeping everything inside the Health ecosystem. It's a practical workaround, although it also highlights that Google's own nutrition tracking still has some catching up to do before it can fully replace dedicated food logging apps.

 

Medical records are where Google's larger vision starts making much more sense. Instead of only storing fitness data from your smartwatch, Google Health can also pull information from supported healthcare providers, including medications, vaccinations, previous consultations, medical conditions and laboratory reports. However, the feature is still limited to only select healthcare providers in India.

 

The idea is to give the Health Coach considerably more context. Instead of only looking at sleep and activity, the AI can then answer questions around your health history, explain lab reports and even highlight results that deserve attention. It makes the assistant feel much more personalised than simply reacting to workout data. 

It even works surprisingly well on an iPhone

Although I primarily used Google Health on the Pixel 10a alongside the Pixel Watch 3, I was curious to see how much of the experience carried over to iOS.

 

So I installed it on an iPhone 17.

 

Surprisingly, the app itself feels almost identical.

 

The interface, AI features and overall navigation remain largely unchanged, so it doesn't feel like Google has treated the iPhone version as an afterthought.

 

The only real limitation comes from wearables.

 

Since the Pixel Watch isn't supported on iOS, you can't pair it with the app. If you want continuous health tracking on an iPhone, you'll need to use a Fitbit wearable instead.

 

It's an understandable limitation, but it also means the overall Google Health experience isn't locked to Android in the way I initially expected.

Verdict

Google Health definitely feels like the future of health apps. Not because it uses AI everywhere, but because, for the first time, the AI actually feels like it has a purpose beyond being a marketing bullet point.

 

Health Coach is genuinely useful. It adapts workout plans, encourages recovery when needed, explains health trends in plain language and feels much closer to having a digital coach than simply chatting with an AI assistant.

 

The redesigned interface is another welcome improvement. It looks cleaner, feels more modern and is far more approachable than the old Fitbit app ever was.

 

Ironically, my biggest criticism comes from the same place as Google's biggest strength.

 

The company has become so focused on interpreting health data that it occasionally forgets to present the data itself. Graphs, trends and glanceable metrics should still be the foundation of a health app. AI explanations should support them, not replace them.

 

Food logging also needs some more refining. However, despite those shortcomings, I kept finding myself opening the app throughout the day. Not because I wanted to chat with AI, but because the overall experience feels more connected than what Fitbit ever offered.