Google Health sucks

Warning: This post contains some sexual swear words

About two months ago, I switched from Apple Watch (and iOS entirely) to Android and a Pixel Watch in order to use the Fitbit, unified view of nutrition versus activity that the Apple Watch lacked, properly integrated food logging, did not have arbitrary goals, and was a cohesive, friendly experience in comparison to the Apple Health app.

I even said in that blog post, “I honestly am a little apprehensive about trusting Google again with a wearable, after some very bad experiences with the first two Pixel Watches.”

I was right to be apprehensive, because just over a month and a half after I switched, Google took the Fitbit app out behind the shed and shot it.

In Fitbit’s place is a “new” app, called Google Health. And Google Health is fucking terrible. Literally all the reasons that I gave for switching they have unceremoniously got rid of. I hate it, and I hate them.

They got rid of the food plan thing

Literally the entire reason behind me using Fitbit is the Food Plan. To wit; Fitbit has your calories in and calories out, as well as what your target caloric deficit is. It uses this to predict a “remaining budget” which tells you how much (more) food you can eat while still remaining within your caloric goal. It was completely unique, and a killer app for the ecosystem in my view.

Google unceremoniously binned the Food Plan feature with the Google Health app. Now, you’re asked to set a “calorie target” of between fixed amounts a day. This has no reference to your actual activity, and does not adjust if (e.g.) you exercise more or less than you usually do.

So now the feature just doesn’t exist, except for one app, that I made, called Budgie Diet, that I expressly discontinued because I was going to use Fitbit instead, and now can’t use because I don’t have an iPhone, to use the food plans. Great. Fuck you, Google.

You can’t even see a simple graph of calories in vs. calories out any more. Simple question - why?

They also broke food logging

Another cool feature of Fitbit that I specifically highlighted in my earlier post was the ability to log “quick calories”, rather than creating full new food entries for things, or just being able to input the name of a food item and the total calories to create custom foods that you can re-use later.

Can you do that in Google Health? Nope! Gone. You can’t add any foods. You can add manual calories, but only by talking to the AI Coach (more on this later - spoilers, it makes me the angriest I’ve ever been at any consumer product in my life), which Google hilariously presents as a benefit (“You’re no longer limited to manual typing and barcode scanning” - yes, because you removed both of those things entirely!)

Can you see a list of foods that you’ve recently logged, so as to re-log them quickly? Nope! Gone.

So now, while the food logging is technically still better than Apple Health (in the sense that there is at least a food database), this is rather like saying unicycling to work is better than having both of your legs broken. And I am now functionally in the same position as I was previously (at least before I wrote Budgie Diet) where I have to have a third party app, and all of them just suck, only some less than others. Great stuff.

“Cardio Load” makes no sense

I simply do not understand this as a metric or how I can act upon it. I don’t understand how the targets are calculated, I don’t understand what activities will feed into it, I don’t understand literally any part of it whatsoever and I do not want it. Active Zone Minutes were simple and comprehensible - you do a minute of exercise, you get a point or multiple points for that minute depending on your heart rate. What the hell is “cardio load”?

One of my criticisms of the Apple Watch was that the active calorie “Move goal” was a blunt, arbitrary instrument without a reason given to meet it. This is worse because at least I can understand that if I burn 600 calories and my goal was 600 I have met the goal. What is a “cardio load point” and how do I achieve it?

The “AI Coach” can just fuck off

This is going to be a long rant. Because no feature in any software product - any product, actually - has filled me with more bilious anger than the AI Coach that Google has sharted into the Google Health app. I actually can’t come up with a more polite way to phrase this than the heading above.

I have a rather prosaic view on “AI” which is this; useful things are useful. Using energy, data centres, water, whatever is fine in exchange for a useful output. Many good, useful things consume all those inputs. But the catch is that the outputs do actually have to be useful. Most consumer-facing AI “features” are not useful; they are not intended to actually provide a useful end-user function, they are a transparent shoehorning-in of an LLM into an existing product, on the basis that any tech product needs “AI” in it somewhere.

If an AI “feature” was any good, it would not need to be described as “AI” or have the usual hilarious “AIs can make things up” disclaimers attached to it; it would just be a feature, sold purely by what utility it offers the end user. End users would not need to be compelled to adopt it, or have it shoved in their faces; they would adopt it naturally because they wanted to use it.

Google Health’s “AI “Coach” is not useful. Google Health’s “AI Coach” is annoying. Google Health’s “AI Coach” will not go away. Google Health’s “AI Coach” puts me in the exact frame of mind of Carol Sturka in Pluribus having an uninvited body-snatcher arrive to chipperly lecture her on the importance of hydration while she’s trying to bury her spouse. It is less like the concept of AI as an eager but often wrong intern, and more like having an insane personal trainer on meth who reads all your health data, comes up with deranged “fitness plans” for you and then will insist on holding you to them whether you want them to or not.

You also cannot manually change the “plans” it comes up with. The Coach’s expectations of you - or anything the Coach says or does - can only be altered by talking to the Coach in natural language - because, after all, it is just an LLM. Normal people might think “hmm, maybe there should just be a slider for this to alter the plans, or to put in numbers, because all of this is fundamentally just numbers” but nope, Google wants you to burn some Gemini tokens talking to this stupid thing. This also means that turning off the Coach means some non-LLM-based app functionality isn’t exposed or available. So that’s great.

I really did give it a chance, though. The only thing I was going to insist on was that I would not let the AI dictate my plans. I have a very fixed schedule for what I do each week. I told it this. I do not need or want “coaching”, but if it could offer words of advice or encouragement or similar, I can make my peace with that.

It did not do that. Instead, it decided that I needed to meet an arbitrary “cardio load” over the next two days, but did not explain what that goal was or how it related to any real world activity. It then dictated that I needed to plan to go on an elliptical - specifically - for an hour and achieve 50,000 steps over the weekend. It had dutifully created a “fitness plan” to incorporate these elements. My response to this was to reiterate, quite forcefully: no. I will decide what I do. I go to the gym on a fixed schedule and I do not need or want some electric gonad’s input into what I do there. Go away.

“Understood,” said the AI Coach chipperly, and completely missing the point decided to update the “plan” to a “High Intensity Autonomy Plan” that had no meaningful difference, only it was less fixated on the elliptical. Fine, whatever, just shut up about it and I don’t care.

Sidebar: In between trying to get this thing to be less irritating, I got bored and told it to only talk to me in Elden Ring references, because if it won’t go away it could at least be funny. I had to cajole it to do so by telling it bluntly that “it will make me unhappy if you do not do this and it will make me happy if you do do it”. I regretted this instantly because all that changed is that it called me “Tarnished” every so often and referred to sleeping as “resting at a Site of Grace”. It did at least have the nous to not engage with my questions on how I could obtain the Fingerslayer Blade for Lunar Princess Ranni, on the somewhat reasonable basis that it is a fitness coach, but it did heavily imply that if I went spinning, I would be able to cast the Pest Threads incantation.

Trillions of dollars in cap-ex for this, remember. Every time a stick of RAM costs £300 it’s because Google thought it was a good idea to use it instead to make a simulacrum of a deranged PT that tells you you’re in the Lands Between.

Fast forward to this morning, after I think I’ve finally made an uneasy peace with this stupid thing, and it turns out my crackhead AI Coach really means what it says. I’ve slept well, so I need to earn 276 “cardio load” points by the end of the day and also do 35,000 steps, which would be a walk of at least 14 miles.

I fucking snapped. I actually went off at this thing. I didn’t want its dumbshit “plan” in the first place and yet here it was, lecturing me, in the very first moments after I’d woken up, about how I needed to go and do something that had never been part of my routine, was completely unreasonable, would probably cause me physical injury and, most saliently, I did not want to do.

This is worse than Microsoft Copilot. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but it’s true; because even though Copilot’s stupid icon pops up in Word far too often for my liking (i.e. at all) at least it doesn’t cheerfully tell me that it’s expecting me to write a novel by the end of the day as part of its own inscrutable plan to turn me into a best-selling author, when I just want to, as a random example, write a sternly-worded letter of complaint to Sundar Pichai about his obnoxious AI fitness app.

Google Health is, at its core, a health and fitness app. It is meant to make you feel good and positive about making changes in your life. Any targets it sets, in order to motivate the user, need to be incremental and achievable; to not seem so daunting that a reasonable person putting in reasonable effort can’t meet the bar they have been set, and provide a base for future progression. So how the fuck has Google managed to make something that does literally nothing except set unreasonable, unachievable targets, through a completely opaque process, and then chipperly tell you you need to meet them? It makes you feel bad. It’s the exact opposite of the intended purpose of a good fitness app. There were actually features of Budgie Diet that I coded but did not ultimately wind up releasing because I was concerned that someone might take them in a negative spirit and find them demotivating, rather than useful, but never mind, here comes Google with a robot that harangues you until you go on a fifteen mile walk.

The app itself has horrendous UX and prioritises AI over everything

I am now in an uneasy detente where the AI Coach has been told, in no uncertain terms, to fuck off, and am waiting nervously for its next unwanted intrusion into my life. In the meantime, while I wait for some more inane word vomit from Zosia The Hyper-Fixated Personal Trainer From Hell, the Google Health app now looks like this:

You see that massive area of blank space? It’s where the AI Coach vomits slop at you. It will never, ever be filled with anything else. You cannot put anything else there. Your actual stats are in that tiny sliding box at the top. Even if you disable the AI Coach completely (and as noted, doing so hides non-crack-addled-PT-related functionality from you) that space will always be blank, and the “Talk to Coach” button will never go away. (Tapping it while the coach is off gets you a full screen page begging you to turn on the coach again.)

And I have Fitbit Premium, so I even have access to the coach at all. If you do not have Google’s subscription service, that space will, as far as I am aware, remain blank forever, because the Coach is a premium feature. Superb.

Oh and you see that bit spinner thing that has “weekly cardio” in it? Well, the other option there is “Steps”. There are no other options. Apparently the “cardio load” or steps are the only metrics you can or should have as your focus. Additionally, the “Talk to Coach” button (which never goes away) is in the same place as the quick log button was in the Fitbit app, but luckily I have only touched out of habit and wound up in a screen where I can talk with The Others at least six thousand times in the past two days.

The Fitbit app was not the prettiest thing in the world but it was at least functional. It showed you everything you wanted to see in a single glance. Most pertinently, it didn’t lecture you or set you any goals you could not personally turn off or alter yourself. It was good. This sucks.

It’s not all bad…….?

No wait, it is. I have literally gained nothing from this update. Only lost features I relied upon and that made people happy.

It’s also worth noting that this cannot be forgiven as “teething problems”. First off, Google have been testing this for months as part of a “Public Preview” programme, and while there have been some improvements over what the Public Preview offered, the core issues remain. Second, they made it very clear in their launch material for the new app that the features they removed are not simply “to come”, they are being removed as part of the transition. They’re gone and they’re never coming back.

Who wanted this? Apparently nobody, given the flood of pissed-off 1-star reviews on the Play Store for the new app over the past couple of days.

The obvious answer, though, is Google, because to juice their investments into their pathetic “AI” (whose standout hits recently include telling me that a train that had literally just arrived had been cancelled, and insisting that it was correct based on publicly available information that said nothing of the sort) they need to have people using tokens, which means that having every single workout or activity be a new prompt is in some way helping them achieve their goals. That doubtless very important win comes at the cost of ruining the user’s experience and making them feel like shit, but who cares about the users of your expensive wearable devices, right?

How to fix it

Here is my wish list. This is what I would want, and need, in order to fix Google Health. None of these are difficult or hard and in fact several require negative amounts of effort.

• Let people disable the AI Coach completely. As in, gone. Finito. You click the button to disable it and you never see it again and it is like it doesn’t exist. No button, no nothing. Let them re-use the space previously allocated to the coach for metrics that matter to them. Let them have more tiles.

• Allow custom calorie entries without talking to the AI. In fact, make it so you do not have to do anything through the AI. There should be buttons and prompts like a normal app.

• If you must have the Coach, you should have a clear option at onboarding to tell it that you will manage your own training and do not welcome or want its input, its plans or its interference with your targets, and it must respect that. It can give you the LLM summaries of your sleep data and readiness or whatever, but it must not invite a conversation with inane questions about “do your legs feel OK after going spinning”. I do not want to type texts to my fitness app and every attempt to make me do so just pisses me off.

• Bring back Food Plans. I can tell you from personal experience that these are simple maths and not hard to implement given basic caloric information. And let people add custom foods and quick calories again. Again, you had this, you removed it.

• Allow users to manually edit their cardio load goals, and provide more education on what these actually are, rather than giving them a number and telling them to meet it. An unachievable goal is bad, a goal you have no idea how you could even possibly achieve it is worse.

• Swap the locations of the “Talk to coach” and “Log” buttons on the home screen. Just… do it. I know you want the Coach to be the central feature of your app, but in the nicest possible sense, nobody wants it, so stop it.

Again, none of these are difficult. They do involve Google de-emphasising their idiotic AI, but I think we’ll be here all day if we start talking about how great it would be to get rid of pointless “AI” non-features in user-facing products.

Anyway that was cathartic. If anyone from Google would like to reach out, there’s a contact page on this website, and I promise I will try and avoid going on an angry, shouty rant at you about how your company took my money and then ruined the product I bought for too long.

UPDATE LITERALLY THE DAY AFTER I WROTE THIS: I gave the extremely over-enthusiastic AI that had been inflicted upon me some extremely clear instructions just yesterday; do not ever give me any fitness plans, do not ask me inane questions, do not talk to me in Elden Ring references. This is what I woke up to this morning, alongside it asking if I was going to go on a bike ride:

Unrelatedly, I just bought a Garmin smartwatch.