How to talk to Phone apps

[PetrNalevka]

Hello,

am I missing something but the FitBit APIs completely miss options how to talk to 3rd party device apps?

I'm developing for Android and to integrate FitBit with my apps I would need to start intents or provide data over content providers etc.. at the moment the only option to do this is to create a local server in my app and communicate over HTTP requests with my apps which is extremely cumbersome and many use-cases cannot be implemented in a battery efficient manner. 

I'm completely missing the point of the Companion API at the moment. I FitBit does not plan to significantly extend the APIs why would you not call fetch() on URLs or get GPS directly on the watch using the watch APIs and leave it up to the API implementation to exchange required messages transparently under the hoot? 

Are there any plans to bring Android-specific or iOS specific support to the APIs in the near future? Or maybe I did miss something which would workaround this type of issues?

Many thanks.

Petr

[JonFitbit · Accepted solution]

Hi Petr,

We don't currently have an API which allows communication with other apps on the mobile side.

If you're comparing this to Pebble development (for example), our Companion API is equivalent to PebbleKit JS. We don't currently have equivalents for PebbleKit iOS or Android.

I encourage you to make a feature suggestion with "SDK" in the subject field: 

https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Feature-Suggestions/idb-p/features

Thanks

Jon

[PetrNalevka]

Hello John, many tanks for the update, this is what I though reading through the docs. 

I just received the Ionic and wanted to do Sleep as Android integration ASAP. There are already users in our community waiting for this and I believe this would make the Ionic a choice for many of our users.

I would really like to do at least a partial integration with the current architecture but doing a HTTP server locally on the device really seems like a too big hack. Would you have any other suggestions how to workaround here? For example if the Android FitBit app would send an intent every time it gets a Companion API message, that would completely resolve this or any other hack which would make such integrations possible without waiting for the a lager update of the SDK and APIs?

Big thanks, any hints on this would be greatly appreciated..

[PetrNalevka]

UPDATE: I did post a feature request for this.. 

https://community.fitbit.com/t5/SDK-Development/Fitbit-SDK-and-APIs-despredly-needs-to-talk-to-phone...

[JonFitbit]

Thanks Petr, that's an interesting idea. I've passed this on internally.