What's new
- Record an activity, WHOOP style. Start activity sits on Home's activities card and in the + menu. Pick a sport, see your band's live heart rate and zone, set a Strain Target, and start.
- The live screen shows Activity Strain on a dial from the first second, with no calibration. It also shows heart rate with the zone bar, average and max heart rate, calories, and a Heart Rate tab with the live trace.
- Pause turns the dial to "Paused" and freezes the timer.
- While an activity records, a live bar above the tab bar brings you back to it, and the lock screen shows a card with the activity, heart rate, timer and zones, plus Pause and Finish.
- Heart rate comes only from your band over Bluetooth. Pulse never reads the phone's GPS or step counter.
- Recorded activities go to Health Connect. On Finish, Pulse saves the session to Health Connect, so Google Health sees it too. Pulse then shows it on the regular activity page with Strain, zones, heart-rate recovery and Coach, usually within a few seconds.
- Steps, distance and pace appear once Google Health has synced your band's data for that time.
- This needs one new permission, writing exercise sessions, which Pulse asks for when you start. Without it, the activity stays in Pulse only.
- Pulse saves it when you next open the app after allowing it.
- Activities under two minutes can only be discarded.
- Delete a recorded activity from the ⋯ menu on its page. It is removed from Pulse and from Health Connect.
- Blood pressure on Health Monitor, read from Health Connect, with AHA categories and a trend.
- Home screen widgets for your scores and heart rate, configurable and drawn in Pulse's own fonts and colours.
- Shake to report a problem. Shake the phone, or open More › About › Report a bug, to tell us what went wrong.
- The report holds what you write, the screen you were on, the phone model and Pulse's version, and never your health data.
- Settings › App › Privacy turns the shake off.
- Error reports. When Pulse crashes or a sync fails, it sends a short, scrubbed report (the error, phone model and Pulse version, never health data), so problems get fixed sooner. Settings › App › Privacy › Send error reports turns this off.
Fixes
- Recovery shows HRV again for nights when Fitbit stamps the night's HRV at wake time, including when you wake after noon.
- Blood pressure readings are actually imported. Health Connect only grants what the app declares, and the declaration was missing.
- Workouts interrupted by the app being closed are no longer left stuck.
- Colours across the app follow the light and dark themes everywhere. Some screens used fixed colours.
- Today's activities are listed newest first.
Installation
- arm64: most Android phones.
- armv7: older 32-bit Android phones.
- x86_64: Android emulators and compatible Chromebooks.
Install over the existing app to keep your data and settings. This update re-imports your history window once and rescores it, so the first sync may take longer than usual.
Validation and known limitations
- 2,097 tests pass, typecheck passes, and lint reports only existing warnings. The native recorder and widget tests pass on Robolectric.
- A multi-reviewer code review covered correctness, security and privacy, reliability, races and standards. One high-severity and ten moderate findings were fixed before release, and the fixes were reviewed again.
- The arm64 build was installed and checked on a physical phone, covering:
- start, live screen, pause, the lock-screen card and Finish into the activity page;
- saving to and deleting from Health Connect;
- shake to report, end to end to Sentry.
- Known limitations:
- When Fitbit also auto-detects the same walk or run, it can appear next to the activity Pulse recorded.
- Paused stretches are not marked as pauses in the session saved to Health Connect.
- Native (non-JavaScript) crash reports are not scrubbed the way JavaScript ones are. Pulse's native code puts no health values in them.
Full changelog: v0.4.1...v0.5.0