Google Is in Full-On Injury Management Over Its New Health App

If there’s one factor you don’t need to screw round with as a tech firm, it’s apps. Just ask Sonos, which accurately needed to fireplace its CEO and begin anew over fallout from a botched app replace. Google apparently didn’t get that memo as a result of its current shift from the Fitbit app to the newly christened Google Health has been… rocky. People are crashing out over the current app replace, and it’s not onerous to see why.

In case you missed it, Google just lately retired its Fitbit app with the launch of the Fitbit Air, a screenless health band and Whoop competitor. In identify and in design, the Fitbit app isn’t any extra, and Google Health is the brand new software program du jour. That shift has ushered in fairly a number of modifications, and to nobody’s shock, a number of of these tweaks must do with AI. Google Health, as folks have discovered, is AI-heavy, and therein lies a number of the app rollout’s issues.

There are a number of stumbles, however right here’s a short, incomplete listing:

• Data factors have been straight-up unsuitable or inconsistent between completely different components of the app
• Workouts have been mislabeled (operating versus basic exercise)
• Sleep scores have been lacking
• There was duplicative content material
• AI summaries have been sycophantic and overly verbose
• Random app crashes

Not nice. And to make issues worse, the overall consensus appears to be that individuals don’t discover the visible replace to the app to be overly interesting both, with complaints on Reddit over the app being noisy and troublesome to parse. I, admittedly, was by no means a consumer of the Fitbit app, so I don’t have the identical context, however right here’s a comparability of how the app used to look and the way it seems now. I’ll allow you to make up your personal thoughts on which feels cleaner.

Google, for its half, is already speeding to make things better, together with all the bugs that I outlined above, and it’s detailed these fixes in a blog update that was pushed out yesterday. The firm says they need to be rolling out within the week forward.

Whether that can sate individuals who have been upset by the shift is one other query completely. As we’ve seen with previous app disasters just like the Sonos one I discussed beforehand, shifts like this will simply put a foul style in folks’s mouths that isn’t simple to eliminate, and it’s not like folks don’t have a rising array of different well being wearables to change to.

For now, Google Health customers must buckle down, it seems, and hope that Google can get its post-Fitbit period geese in a row. This can also be not the primary time that Google has skilled a messy app migration. There was related backlash when Google tried transitioning Nest customers from the Nest app to the Google Home app. It took years earlier than the Google Home app lastly received function parity with the Nest app, and even then, Google nonetheless hasn’t discontinued the Nest app for some cause.