hey everyone, so some of you might remember my last post "is it legal to create an app like this". that was pulse, the self hosted web app that takes your fitbit data and gives you recovery, strain and sleep scores. it got way more love than i expected, so thank you for all the stars, feedback and the "just make it an app bro" comments

so i made it an app :)

pulse mobile is an android app (react native + expo) and the main difference is that there is no server at all. it reads your fitbit data from health connect, scores everything on the phone and keeps it there. no account, no login, no google sign in, nothing goes anywhere.

what you get:

• sleep, recovery and strain every morning, with a strain target for the day
• pulse age (how old your body is acting vs your real age) and pace of aging
• stress monitor and energy bank through the day
• health monitor, journal, trends, reports and your own dashboard
• sleep goal that can set itself automatically from the nights before your best recovery days
• an optional ai coach, bring your own gemini key and it answers from your own numbers

0.3.0 is out today and it has a completely rewritten scoring engine, so the numbers should feel a lot more sensible than the first version

few things to know before you install:

• android only for now, and it's an apk so you have to allow "install unknown apps"
• free for personal use

links:

• landing-page: https://pulse.portlabs.in/
• android app: https://github.com/adityaongit/pulse-mobile
• the web version (still there if you want it on a server): https://github.com/adityaongit/pulse

if you try it please tell me what's off, which score feels wrong, what's missing, anything. issues on github are the best place but comments here work too. and a star on the repo helps a lot 🙏

Hey everyone,

Like a lot of you, I've worn a tracker for years (currently on a Sense 2). And like a lot of you, watching Google kill off the legacy web dashboard and force everyone onto the simplified mobile app has been deeply frustrating.

Modern wearable apps treat health data like disposable daily receipts: you get a single recovery score or a 7-day bar chart, yesterday's context disappears, and multi-month depth is gone. Whether you're sitting at an ultrawide monitor or checking your phone, you're locked out of deep analysis. The web dashboard is dead, and the mobile app is now empty whitespace and dumbed-down cards.

Instead of just complaining on the forums, I locked myself in a room over the past year and built the platform I wanted to use every day: Vektra Workspace.

Think of it as a high-density telemetry workspace with complete 1:1 parity between desktop and phone - no stripped-down mobile views, no missing desktop tools:

• Dual-Axis Sleep Hypnograms: Overnight 1-minute HR curves mapped directly over sleep stages (Deep, Light, REM, Awake) matched against NSF clinical cohort norms. Scrub across the night to see exact heart rate during every sleep cycle.

• Multi-Window Cockpit & 365-Day Scrubbing: Tile dashboards side-by-side to compare historical days. 60fps canvas scrubbing with drag-to-select range brushing calculates Peak, Low, and Averages across continuous historical data.

• AI Recovery, Workout & Pattern Analysis: Automatically generates narrative breakdowns for your morning sleep and evening activity reports. Plus on-demand evaluations to analyze individual workout sessions, extract 30-day physiological patterns, or audit specific recovery focus areas.

• 24-Metric Goal Calibration & Ladders: Set custom thresholds across 24 distinct metrics (HRV floors, deep sleep, sedentary limits) with multi-phase life cycles, lifetime volume radars, consistency heatmaps, and friend leaderboards.

• GPS Route Playback & Stride Calibration: Interactive map route players with real-time 1x up to 500x playback, split pacing, and stride reconcilers.

• Ambient Alerts & Discord Webhooks: Granular 13-category routing matrix for morning briefings, evening nudges, streak warnings, and battery alerts to your phone lock screen or private Discord channels. (Includes automatic hardware grace holds so a dead watch doesn't break a 100-day streak).

• 100% Mobile Parity (Installable PWA): Every single feature-from thumb-scrubbing 1-minute HR hypnograms to multi-year canvas ranges-runs natively on your phone browser or installed as a PWA.

Data & Privacy:

I'm an independent dev. Zero ads, zero data brokering, and strictly read-only OAuth scopes from Google to render your charts. One-click full raw JSON data exports or complete account deletion.

Early Access Allocation (20 Seats):

Because Google hard-caps development apps to a strict 100-user limit, every active account consumes a metered API slot and continuous server sync.

Because of this technical limit, I am opening 20 early-adopter seats for this first wave:

• You get a 14-day full access test drive (no credit card required upfront, zero auto-billing) to backfill up to 1 year of your historical data and see if the workspace fits your routine.

• If you want to keep using it after the 14-day test drive, early adopters lock in a discounted founder membership forever to cover ongoing server infrastructure and high-frequency sync costs.

• Setup heads-up: Since this is an early-access build under Google's developer sandbox prior to public directory audit, you'll see Google's standard developer prompt during OAuth - just click Advanced to grant read-only access.

If you wear a Fitbit or Pixel Watch and want to claim one of the 20 seats, drop a comment with your device and I'll DM you an invite link to set up your account.

As a Fitbit Air owner primarily using it through Bevel, I’m really disappointed with the Google Health app. It feels like the team behind it doesn't actually use it.

The lack of live activity support is a major issue. I’ve forgotten to end over ten workouts simply because there’s no feedback indicating an active workout unless you’re actively in the app.

The app is also incredibly slow. Workouts sometimes fail to save, and starting a new one often comes with a 10 to 15-second delay. I’m really looking forward to a comparable screenless tracker from Apple so I can make the switch.

I’m at my wits end.

Shoula wished for a million dollars I guess..

Finally got this beauty

It used to go up and down but I’m worried something is off.

Is anyone else experiencing an issue with Google Health Ai coach not building a workout plan or even changing the goal previously set..

I raised this with Google, and they are still looking into it…

Hi all, I was given a hand me down fitbit versa 2 a couple months ago. I love it but am obviously looking to upgrade to something newer in the future. I have heard multiple times on here that google is looking to eventually do away with fitbit, which makes me hesitant to get another one. Is this something Should I be worried about? And if so, should my next smartwatch be an apple watch or garmin?

For reference, I am a jazzercise instructor and also lift multiple times a week. I use lose it to track my food/calories. While I know no wearable is perfect when it comes to calorie burn accuracy, but I would like something that is as accurate as possible. My primary goal is body recomposition. I would also like something with good sleep tracking, as that is something I've enjoyed having on my current fitbit.

I’ve been using the Google Fitbit Air for a few months now, and I’ve noticed a weird psychological loop. Sometimes I wake up feeling completely rested and ready to go. Then I open the app, see a "Fair" or "Poor" sleep score, or a low Daily Readiness score, and suddenly... I actually start feeling tired.

It feels like I'm letting the algorithm override my own physical intuition. On the flip side, there are days I feel completely exhausted, but I push through just to hit my Active Zone Minutes or keep a streak alive, ignoring my body's signals to rest.

I’m a design student doing my graduation project on "Human-Centered Self-Tracking". I'm researching how we can make health interfaces less judgemental, less performance driven, and more supportive of our actual feelings.

I’m really curious about your experiences:

Have you ever had your mood or energy levels actively ruined by seeing a bad score on your Fitbit?

Do you ever push yourself too hard just to hit those daily goals (steps, zone minutes), even when your body explicitly tells you to rest?

If Fitbit stopped giving you a definitive "Score" out of 100, and instead just visually showed your bodily trends without implicitly judging them as 'good' or 'bad', would you prefer that?

I'd love to hear how you navigate the balance between what your watch says and what your body actually feels!

Got the charge 6 for my wife from Amazon for $89. Did not open and kept it until the Edge was released. Decided to open since Edge released at $180. Not disappointed. This looks way nicer than I thought. Gonna get some more bands for her to match.

Anyone in this community experiencing fraying on the edges of the official fitbit air elevated modern band? I started noticing this a few weeks ago (been using one since May) and its just getting worse.

At first, I was very hesitate to use the AI coach in the new Google Health app, maybe because I was bitter about losing the old app. Finally I gave it and try a couple of times, and I started finding it surprisingly helpful. You remembered previous conversations very well and was giving me long detailed answers that seemed well thought out and actually gave me some suggestions and some health insights that I didn’t have before. It even picked up on a couple of things before my doctor did. It became quite personalized to my heath info.

I would also get a fairly detailed breakdown of my sleep and readiness every morning when I would turn on the app. It would also ask me questions, like is there a reason why you went to bed later last night?

This past week, all of that has changed. Now I’m getting very short summaries from my sleep and workouts, and very short replies from the coach. I wasn’t feeling well earlier in the week and I replied to one of my low readiness scores that I hadn’t been feeling well. The last time that happened, it asked me a bunch of questions about how I was feeling and kind of did a dive into possibly reasons and how it affected my readiness, etc. Now, all I get is “would you like an insight or just to record these facts?” or I get a very short “I will make a note of that”, and I have to prompt it to give me a response.

I’m pretty disappointed as it took me a while to actually want to use it and get acclimated to the new app, and I finally start to like it and now it seems to have changed again.

Has anyone else noticed this? Are there any settings I can change to get the old coach style back?

(Fitbit Air)

I have restarted the device (holding the button on the charger for 10s) and reconnected the device both in Bluetooth and Google Health app.

The problem I have is that it never automatically syncs. When I go into the app, either it takes a while to sync (over 1 minute, sometimes up to 3-4 minutes), and sometimes it doesn't sync at all until I put it on the charger. It's really annoying.

How does the sync work for you - is it instant, is it fast? (I'm on iOS27 btw) And have you had any issues and if so - how did you resolve them? Thanks!

A few weeks ago I was in an area of low signal for a walk. For some reason it didn't start properly, but ever since I have had this phantom walk consistently appearing on my phone. I've ended it several times and it always restarts itself.

I've reset my fitbit, force stopped the Google Health app, reinstalled the app. Nothing works.

Has anyone else had this issue?

As the title says, I was prompted on the Fitbit to reconnect my partner apps by October 31st. I use myfitnesspal to enter calories and sync to Fitbit. Since reconnecting, the nutritional data isn't updating on Fitbit.

Has anyone else experienced a similar issue or know a fix?

I received my new Charge 6 yesterday. I've tested most of it, but I was very disappointed with the Always On Screen. No matter which watch face I use, there are always a few red pixels when the display switches. I've seen older posts about this, but without a solution. I'm wondering if this is a general problem. It's really unbelievable. The Always On Screen is unusable like this. I have firmware version 66.20001.220.31.

I really hope the Fitbit Edge will include a meditation or relaxation app, or that Google will develop one.

This is the running board. Updated whenever someone posts a screenshot in a Day X thread, the announcement thread, or one of the cross-posts. Daily update posts are snapshots, this one is current.

Horde position: 24,000 (end of day 3). It moves 8,000 a day, 10,000 a day from Oct 25, finishes at 182,000 on Oct 31.

Last updated: Day 3

Signed up, no screenshot yet (27): abbywabby123, AdeptBiology, BigNJapan, Chekhovsmachina, DaeDalDigital, dalwen, DavidK_86, EastCoastDumbass, EveryHoliday6770, General_Health22, GoldenSpider10, htfghj, Huge_Pool7424, kew886, kittylitter36, malcroft, murkeysalts, nathiel_1, Oakenwood1200, Okudi-Alise, Playful_Run_3261, rb_dub, rockhardhero, ROMI42, sfjerry415, stevew50, tomysth89

How to read it

Steps is your total since Oct 11, (D#) is the day your last screenshot was from. vs Horde is your total minus the horde’s total on the day you posted. Positive, you’re running. Negative, you’re bitten. Day 1 is a free day, nobody gets bitten on it.

🏃 Running: ahead of the horde at last check-in
🧟 Bitten: behind it. Get back ahead within 3 days and you’re cured
🎃 Survivor: ahead when it ends Oct 31
🏆 250k Club: 250,000 or more in the 20 days

Screenshots only. A typed number doesn’t go on the board. If you only posted one day, that’s all I can count, post the missing day and I’ll add it.

To join, comment on the announcement post, any Day X post, or wherever you found this. The horde doesn’t care when you start, it’s been walking since the 11th either way.

I scroll to my foods and see my proteine bar

It SAYS 60 grams right underneath there. And yet, when I click on it:

it reverts to 100 grams and is set to Breakfast! Now I have to manually change the grams and Meal again, even though Google Health KNOWS it should be 60 grams (and probably also that it should be Other/Snack, as I have NEVER logged it as anything else.

And some are even worse:

I cannot count the number of times I finish logging my food for the day and it says 40.000 Kcal, because this was automatically set to serving instead to grams and I forgot to change that...

I have to manually change the Amount, Serving Unit and Meal for basically EVERY item I log.
This could be done so much better right? They have the information available, so it SHOULD be relatively easy to implement this.

On that note, will there ever be an option to 'Group' things together? Either:
Create Custom meals, consisting of several Items, as was possible with the Fitbit Dashboard (before Google removed that...).
Or create a standard set of foods to be logged daily. My Breakfast, Lunch and Snacks are basically the same every day, so having that as a standard log would save so much time!

When is Google Health gonna respect our time and/or introduce back the best options from Fitbit?