Health Connect, Explained: How Fitbit Kit Reads Your Wearable

If you've set up Fitbit Kit on Android, you've met Health Connect — the permission screen that asks which data types Fitbit Kit is allowed to read. It's worth understanding what's happening, because it's the reason your data stays yours.

A shared, on-device health store

Health Connect is a system-level store on your phone where health apps read and write data. Your Fitbit or Pixel Watch app writes steps, sleep, and workouts into it. Fitbit Kit reads from it. The data lives on your device, and each app only sees the data types you explicitly grant.

Why Fitbit Kit uses it instead of a cloud API

We could ask you to log into a cloud account and pull data from a server. We deliberately don't. Reading through Health Connect means:

• No Fitbit Kit account. There's nothing to sign up for and no password to leak.
• Granular consent. Grant steps but not heart rate? That's your call, per data type.
• Local first. Your health history doesn't get copied to a Fitbit Kit server just to draw a grid.

Granting and revoking access

You can change Fitbit Kit's permissions any time from Health Connect in your system settings. Revoke a data type and the matching auto habit simply stops updating — nothing breaks, and your manual habits carry on untouched.

On iOS the same model applies through Apple Health. The principle is identical: your device is the source of truth, and Fitbit Kit is a reader, not a warehouse.