Bevel App Lets You Ditch Google Health on Your Fitbit Air

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The Fitbit Air is a really nice wearable — it’s thin, unobtrusive, and cheap. But its app, Google Health, has problems. It gives you paragraphs of AI-generated text multiple times a day as long as you have premium features turned on, and it’s missing simple things like the ability to see your stats from yesterday. Fortunately, the iPhone app Bevel is now compatible with Google Health, which means you can replace the app entirely.

What is Bevel?

Bevel is an iOS app that reads health and fitness data from Apple Health. Back when it was subscription-only, it was best known as an app that uses your Apple Watch to give you the kind of metrics you’d normally get from Whoop. But Bevel is free to use these days, with only a few add-on features behind a paywall. It can also pull data directly from Garmin, Oura, Strava, or now, Google Health. That means you can wear your Fitbit Air, ignore its native app, and instead browse your health data and track your workouts through Bevel.

Unlike Google Health, Bevel has habit logging, a strength training feature that keeps track of what muscles you worked and whether you’re getting stronger, live activities for workouts, and food logging that includes barcode scanning — even on the free tier. Meanwhile, Google Health can only scan barcodes with a Premium subscription and AI turned on.

How to Use Bevel with Your Fitbit Air

To get the best of both worlds, you still need to have the Google Health app installed. Make sure it’s set up with your Fitbit Air as a connected device. If you have Premium or a Google AI subscription, you may want to turn off the Health Coach so you stop getting constant commentary. You could turn off notifications entirely, but then you’d miss alerts letting you know your Fitbit Air is running low on battery.

Next, install Bevel. To get Fitbit Air data, go to Settings and then Data Sources. Tap the plus button next to Integrations, and choose Google Health. This will let Bevel pull in data from Google Health, which gets it from your Fitbit Air. If you use other devices, you can add them here as well.

What You Get with Bevel

Cardio load as reported by Google Health (left) and Bevel (right)

Here are a few things to like about using Bevel rather than Google Health:

• You can see a previous day’s metrics by tapping on today’s date and then choosing any date in the past — something Google Health is somehow still missing.
• You can do strength workouts in the app. Bevel provides a timer for the whole workout and for each set and rest period, lets you add exercises, and tracks your progress over time.

If you’ve been frustrated with Google Health’s limitations, Bevel offers a straightforward, free way to get more out of your Fitbit Air data without paying for a premium subscription.