Why Bevel Is a Much Better App for Fitbit Air Than Google Health
The Fitbit Air is a really good wearable : thin, discreet, and inexpensive. But its Google Health app has some issues. It feeds you paragraphs of AI-generated text several times a day if you have premium features enabled , and it lacks simple features like viewing your stats for the previous day. Fortunately, the Bevel app for iPhone is now compatible with Google Health, meaning you can completely replace it.
What is a chamfer?
Bevel is an iOS app that pulls health and fitness data from Apple Health. When it was subscription-only , I thought of it as an app that used your Apple Watch to provide metrics similar to those typically provided by Whoop. But now Bevel is free to use , with only a few premium features available for a fee. The app can directly pull data from Garmin, Oura, Strava, and now Google Health. This means you can wear your Fitbit Air, ignore its built-in app (Google Health), and instead view your health data and track your workouts through Bevel.
Unlike Google Health, Bevel offers habit tracking, a strength training feature that tracks which muscles you’ve used and whether you’re getting stronger, real-time activity tracking for workouts, and nutrition tracking with barcode scanning, even in the free version. Google Health, meanwhile, only supports barcode scanning with a premium subscription and AI enabled.
How to use Bevel with your Fitbit Air
To get the full benefits of both systems, you still need to install the Google Health app. Make sure it’s configured to connect to your Fitbit Air. If you have a Premium or Google AI subscription, you may want to disable the Health Coach feature to stop receiving constant feedback from your coach. (You can disable notifications entirely, but then you’ll miss the ones that alert you when your Fitbit Air’s battery is low.)
Next, install Bevel. To receive data from the Fitbit Air, go to “Settings,” then “Data Sources .” Tap the plus button next to “Integrations” and select Google Health . This will allow Bevel to receive data from Google Health, which in turn receives it from the Fitbit Air. If you use other devices, you can add them here as well.
What you get with Bevel
Here are a few things I like about using the Bevel app compared to Google Health:
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To view your metrics for the previous day, you need to tap on today’s date and then select any date in the past—for some reason, this feature is still missing from Google Health.
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The app lets you do strength training. Bevel displays a timer throughout the workout, as well as for each set and rest period; it lets you add exercises and record the weight and number of reps; and it tracks which muscles you’ve recently used. Google doesn’t have anything like this.
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You can change your status to “sick,” “injured,” or “on break” if you don’t want to be constantly reminded to maintain your usual activity level.
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Cardio metrics are presented in a much more understandable way: as a graph showing your workout history and recommended time interval, rather than as a single target from Google.
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Bevel’s “workouts” are limited to a few lines of text with comments about how your workout went or how you slept, unlike Google’s long and often hallucinatory paragraphs.
Bevel offers a premium plan with AI-powered training and an estimate of your “biological age,” which I haven’t tried yet. Overall, I find the free plan a much better way to view Fitbit Air data than Google’s free or premium plans. Bevel’s integration with Google Health launched this week, and I think I’ll be using it for my Fitbit Air in the future.