Jawbone has launched its new Up app for the iPhone, which utilizes Apple's Health app and HealthKit to track and deliver advice based on a user's diet and physical activity. Not to be confused with Jawbone's other Up app, this newest app does not require the company's fitness tracker and works with over a hundred apps and devices, including MyFitnessPal, Strava Running and Cycling, IFTTT, and more.
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Information from meals logged throughout the day can be used to help generate nutritional advice, while data from workouts can be used to help set goals for the future. The Up app also allows users to log their sleep, which can be analyzed and used to provide advice on future sleep adjustments. All of the advice generated is powered by Jawbone's Insight Engine, which works with both recorded data and data from the Internet to deliver information on a variety of fitness-related subjects.
The app also includes a number of social functions, including the ability to add friends to a "team" to compare and track fitness scores and goals. Users can also set their own goals within a team and receive notifications when progress is being made. Insights generated by the Up app can also be shared through email, message, Facebook, and Twitter.
Up by Jawbone is a free app for the iPhone and can be downloaded in the App Store. [Direct Link]
Top Rated Comments
(View all)I want Health to be my health/fitness data aggregator, I want all my other H&F apps (Nike, Up, Withings) to share their data with it, not just leach it out. If these third party apps aren't going to play ball, then Health will be pretty useless and HealthKit itself will be no improvement on the arbitrary data sharing that exists between different 3rd party apps at the moment.
Not only that, but there's the privacy issue. I'm reasonably happy to have all my data stored in Health as I trust Apple (YMMV), but have you seen the privacy policies of some of these other companies - Jawbone's for example? Many policies allow them to share (i.e. sell) your data to other parties so there's a great incentive for them to force you into using their app as your data aggregator by not sharing its native data through HealthKit. As far as I can see from their T&Cs, once you allow Up to leach your medical information via HealthKit, you allow Jawbone to do what it wants with that information.
Health/HealthKit is only going to work if every app shares its native data back to Health. After all, it's my data, let me decide which apps have access to it!
But instead of updating the app that is used by their paying customers, Jawbone has created a new app that doesnt require their hardware and is free. Now, Im glad people are getting this nicely-designed app for free and I hope lots of people use it. But I really dont like how theyve treated their current customers by not allowing them to take advantage of the Health app as well.
UP by Jawbone will receive only. UP for UP & UP24 will receive & push
Sounds positive, except they say that "UP by Jawbone" (the new purple app) will receive only, which seems to conflict with what the app settings and Health sharing settings say about it
Feel free to RT what I've asked Jawbone to clarify:
https://twitter.com/NeilJonesOnline/status/516606165867069440
I agree with your insight. The reason you won't see many companies looking to feed their own data IN to HealthKit is because there is little benefit for them in doing so. Their benefit is pulling data from it. Most will see little benefit from feeding it back in as they get nothing out of it.
I use the Jawbone UP24 and would love to feed my data into Health, as I'm sure many Jawbone users would. If this doesn't happen then I'll look to switch to a tracker that does. So I'd say, yeah, Jawbone has something to gain from feeding their data.
I agree completely with both of you. Jawbone has said on Twitter that the current UP app, the one that uses the bracelet, will "soon" be updated with HealthKit support. Even so, if the update makes the app import from Health but not export to Health, it will be pretty useless to me. I will consider ditching Jawbone and buying another tracking device if they don't sort this thing out and play nice with HealthKit in an useful way.
Completely agree with the comments - I want my data to go IN to Heath-Kit - not OUT of Health-Kit.
I have the 6 Plus and it's way to big to carry around ALL the time, so I want to be able to feed my data from my wearable in to the Health-Kit. It's nice that the phones now track your fitness data, but a phone isn't a wearable and won't be with you all the time and likely won't be that accurate. For instance, if I use a treadmill and set the phone on the display to watch video, it's not going to pick up my steps or running.