readiness on android, from health connect
Recovery scoring on Android does not need a particular watch. It needs whatever you already wear to write sleep and heart data into Health Connect.
What is Health Connect?
Health Connect is Android’s shared store for health and fitness data. Apps write measurements into it and, with your permission, other apps read them back, so your watch, your phone and a recovery app do not each need their own copy. It ships as part of Android 14 and later, and installs from the Play Store on Android 9 to 13. RestUp reads seven record types from it: sleep sessions with their stages, heart rate, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, blood oxygen and exercise sessions. It never writes back, the same read-only relationship Apple Health has with RestUp on iPhone. Permissions are granted per record type and can be withdrawn at any time in the Health Connect app, where each app’s access is listed, which revokes RestUp’s access immediately without deleting anything you have already recorded. The readiness score itself does not change with the source: the same five weighted components run on whichever platform supplies the data.
Which watches and bands work?
Any device whose companion app writes to Health Connect, but makers do not all write the same things, and that decides how complete your score is. RestUp measures nothing itself: it reads what your device’s own app wrote, so the quality of your readiness score follows the quality of your device’s sleep tracking. A night your watch did not record shows as missing rather than guessed at.
| Companion app | Sleep | Heart rate | Resting heart rate | HRV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Samsung Health (Galaxy Watch) | Yes | Yes | Not documented | Not documented |
| Google Health, formerly Fitbit (Pixel Watch, Fitbit) | Yes | Yes | No, it only reads it | Yes |
| Garmin Connect | Yes | Yes | Not documented | Not documented |
| Oura | Yes | Yes | Not documented | Yes |
“Not documented” means the maker does not list it. A newer version of its app may add it, and the Health Connect app shows exactly what each app has written on your phone. RestUp reads resting heart rate only as a record another app wrote; it does not work it out from raw heart rate.
What RestUp does with a gap: without resting heart rate, the recovery component averages the signals it does have; without HRV, the nervous-system component is left out and the score is rescaled across the rest, as how the readiness score works explains. So a Galaxy Watch still gives you sleep balance, consistency, training load and part of recovery, but not the HRV-based parts.
What is different from the iPhone version?
Two things, and both are worth saying plainly. There is no RestUp watch app on Android and no Wear OS complications: the native watch app and complications are Apple Watch only. On Android your readings live in the app and in three home screen widgets — readiness, sleep, and tonight.
The other difference is invisible but worth knowing. Apple Health reports overnight heart rate variability as SDNN; Health Connect reports it as RMSSD. They are different measures of the same thing and their absolute values are not comparable. RestUp only ever compares your HRV with your own fourteen-night baseline, so a night above or below your usual reads the same way on both. One part is not perfectly symmetric: the recovery component scores HRV in millisecond steps, and because SDNN and RMSSD sit at different typical values, those steps are not exactly the same size on both platforms. The nervous-system component works in percentages and has no such quirk. Either way, do not compare your number with a friend’s across platforms.
Is a separate band worth it if you have an Android phone?
If you already sleep in a watch that records heart rate, no — the data is already in Health Connect and reading it costs you nothing extra. A dedicated band earns its place when it measures something your watch does not, or when battery life means you actually wear it overnight and your watch charges instead. RestUp is a wellness companion, not a medical device, and a low score is a nudge to rest rather than a diagnosis.
Sources
- Samsung Developers: Health Connect FAQ and Samsung Health data through Health Connect (February 2025): the data types Samsung Health syncs.
- Google Health help: Health Connect: what the Google Health app writes and reads.
- Oura help: Health Connect: what Oura exports.
- Android Police on Garmin and Health Connect (July 2025). Garmin’s own FAQ could not be loaded when this page was checked.
- Android Health Connect: HeartRateVariabilityRmssdRecord: Health Connect stores HRV as RMSSD.