It’s about time: Pebble Health app plays catch-up with Apple Watch

Pebble Health provides native fitness and sleep tracking. Photo: Killian Bell/Cult of Android

Pebble Health provides native fitness and sleep tracking. Photo: Killian Bell/Cult of Android

You no longer have to rely on third-party apps to track your fitness on a Pebble watch. Pebble is today rolling out a new update that adds Pebble Health, a new fitness and sleep tracking feature that wants to help you become fitter and healthier.

Pebble Health, which is available on Pebble Time, Time Steel, and Time Round, natively counts your steps and sets goals based on previous activity — and monitors your sleep to help you establish not only whether you’re getting enough, but also the quality of sleep you’re getting each night.

Pebble teamed up with Stanford University to develop its activity tracking algorithm, and all of the data recorded in Pebble Time can be shared with Apple’s Health platform on iOS, and Google Fit on Android. Pebble will also make it possible for third-party apps to use this data next year.

We’ve long been able to download apps from the likes of Misfit and Jawbone that provide step counting on Pebble watches, but with Pebble Health, we get a native experience that should be more user-friendly, and more accessible.

Sadly, Pebble Health won’t be coming to older Pebble watches, but there is good news for those still clinging onto one of the originals; a new firmware update rolling out today brings Pebble Time’s new Timeline interface and unlimited apps support.