Earlier this month, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, every company under the soon announced a generic Bluetooth enabled pedometer and marketed it as the hottest wearable on the market. But the thing is, your phone already knows how many steps you take. If you have a Samsung phone, there’s even an app called S-Health that’ll track your steps for you. According to the Google Operating System Blog (which isn’t affiliated with Google), they say they’ve discovered an API that Google is working on that will make step tracking a key feature in Android.

Is this Google trying to play catchup to Apple’s M7 co-processor in the new iPhone? While it’s hard to compare a software API to a dedicated hardware sensor, both enable third part developers to do some pretty interesting things. Instead of buying a Fitbit and having all your data owned by them, you could install any step tracking app you want and use that.

More importantly, what if Google centralizes your step data and lets developers interact with it? So say a new health app comes out that’s the talk of the town, but you don’t want to try it because it’ll mean “starting over” with a fresh slate. If Google knows how many steps you’ve taken since buying your smartphone, then that won’t be an issue anymore.

[Via: ReadWriteWeb