Health Connect has nowhere to put the weight you lifted

Health Connect is the part of Android that lets your health and fitness apps talk to each other without each one building its own integration with all the others. It is genuinely good infrastructure, it is built into Android 14 and later, and almost nothing written about it is aimed at the person deciding whether to switch it on.

So here is that article, for people who lift. What Health Connect can carry, what it cannot, what “your data stays on your device” actually means when you read Google’s own wording, and why a strength log is a slightly awkward fit for it.

The thing nobody mentions: it has no field for how heavy

This is the finding that matters most and the one that’s hardest to find. Health Connect models a workout as an exercise session, and a session can contain segments. A segment carries a type, such as bench press, and a repetitions count. Planned sessions can carry a repetitions goal.

Nowhere in the data types reference, the workouts guide or the training-plans guide is there a field for the load. No kilograms, no pounds, no target weight. The performance targets Google documents for planned workouts are heart-rate based.

This isn’t a criticism of Google. Health Connect was built to move the measurements a phone and a watch can take, and load is something only your logging app knows. But it does settle a question people reasonably ask: no, you can’t use Health Connect as the place your training history lives, and no strength app can hand its full record to another one through it.

Read and write are separate, per data type

Health Connect permissions are more granular than most people expect. Every standard data type has its own pair, a read permission and a write permission, named for the type: weight, steps, heart rate, nutrition, body fat, lean body mass, exercise. An app that wants to read your weight asks for exactly that, and it doesn’t thereby get your heart rate.

On your side, Health Connect gives you Permissions and data, then App permissions. Pick an app and you can flip everything at once with an Allow all switch, or set read and write per data type individually. Google’s own developer policy frames this as the point of the system: apps request specific data types rather than broad permissions.

The asymmetries, which all favor writing

You may have read that apps can write to Health Connect but not read. As a blanket rule that is not right, since every standard type ships with both permissions. But there are four real asymmetries in Google’s documentation, and they all lean the same way:

• Reads are time limited by default. An app can normally read only the 30 days before its permission was first granted. Going further back needs an additional permission for historic data. Writing has no equivalent limit.
• Background reads need their own permission. An app reading your data while you’re not using it must ask separately. Background writes have no such gate.
• Exercise routes are literally asymmetric. The write permission is singular and the read permission is plural, and an app can’t read route data created by other apps while running in the background, even when you’ve granted it always-allow access.
• Health records use a single write permission but granular read permissions, in Google’s words, for medical data.

Beyond the platform, nothing obliges an app to request read permissions at all. An app can be write-only because its developers chose that, which is a decision about their product rather than a rule of Android’s.

“Stored on your device” is true, and it’s not the whole sentence

Google says your Health Connect data is stored locally on your device and that you control which apps have access. That’s accurate and it’s a real design decision worth crediting.

The same Google support page also says this: when third party apps access your health records, they may make a copy of your data.

There’s a partial check on this. Health Connect keeps a record of which apps touched your data, under Permissions and data, then Data and access, then recent access. The window is the past 24 hours only, so it answers what happened this morning rather than what an app has been doing for a year.

Where to find it

On Android 14 and later Health Connect is part of the operating system, with nothing to install: Settings, then Security and privacy, then Privacy Controls, then Health Connect. On Android 13 and earlier it’s a separate app from the Play Store. Google’s SDK supports Android 8 and up, but the app itself needs Android 9 or later, so that is the real floor. Manufacturers rename Settings sections, so the path may differ slightly on your phone.

One more setting worth knowing if several apps write the same measurement: Manage data, then data sources and priority, decides which app wins when they disagree. There is also an auto-delete option that clears data after a period you choose.

What FitTrack writes, and what it cannot

FitTrack’s Health Connect integration is optional and mostly reading. If you connect it, it reads weight, steps, heart rate, resting heart rate, total and active calories, nutrition, height, body fat, lean body mass, body water mass and basal metabolic rate. Those reads happen on demand and never in the background. You can revoke any of it in Android settings whenever you like, without asking us.

It writes exactly four things back, all of them records you created, all at the moment you finish a workout. The workout itself goes across as an exercise session: when it started, when it ended, what type of training it was and what it was called. Where no other app already measured the energy, FitTrack adds its own on-device estimate of the calories that session burned, filed as both active energy and total energy so apps that show one or the other can display it. And if you wore the FitTrack watch app for that session, the heart-rate readings the watch took go across with it. That’s the whole of it. FitTrack never writes anything you didn’t record, never backfills a workout you finished before this, never edits or deletes another app’s data, and never writes in the background.

What it cannot write is the part this article is about. There is no field for load, so the 80kg on the bar has nowhere to go, and the set-by-set detail stays on the phone because Health Connect cannot hold it. That is the honest shape of the trade: Health Connect learns that you trained, for how long, and roughly what it cost you, which is what the rest of your health apps actually want to know. It does not learn what you lifted, and it could not be made to. The record of your training still lives in one place, on your device.

Platform behavior was read from Google’s own developer and support documentation on the date at the top of this article. Android changes, so check the source before relying on any of it.