amethyst/docs/health-connect-play-declaration.md

Health Connect — Play Console declaration

Source text for the Health Connect permissions declaration in Play Console. Keep this file and the declaration in sync: Google re-reviews the declaration on every Health Connect permission change.

Approved use case claimed: "Fitness, wellness and coaching" — "apps designed to help users track, monitor, analyze, manage, and improve their physical fitness."

Rejection 1 — the use case, and what changed

The first submission described the feature as "read finished workouts so the user can post them to their social network." That is not one of the six approved use cases, and it reads as the prohibited "publicly displaying or socially sharing sensitive data." It was rejected as "Use of permission is not a permitted/valid use case."

The app changed, not just the wording. Amethyst now has My Fitness, a personal training dashboard that summarises the user's own Health Connect workouts for them: weekly totals, week-over-week movement, a per-activity breakdown, best efforts, active days and a training streak. It is its own destination in the navigation drawer, under "You", and works fully whether or not the user ever publishes anything. Publishing a workout is now one optional action on a row of that dashboard.

The permissions serve the dashboard. If the declaration below is ever re-read against the app, the test to apply is: every data type listed is rendered back to the user as their own statistic, on a screen that has no posting requirement.

The dashboard does not depend on Health Connect. It builds the training log from two sources: Health Connect, and the user's own published kind 1301 workout events. A user who never grants a health permission still gets the full summary of everything they have logged — Health Connect adds the device detail (heart rate, steps, climb) and the workouts they never posted. This matters for the declaration's honesty: Health Connect enriches a tracking feature that exists on its own rather than being the feature.

Related code:

• commons/.../commons/fitness/WorkoutStats.kt — all dashboard arithmetic; pure, unit-tested.
• commons/.../commons/fitness/TrainingLog.kt — merges Health Connect with the user's own published workouts, deduping the ones that appear in both.
• ui/screen/loggedIn/workouts/fitness/MyFitnessScreen.kt — the dashboard.
• service/workouts/health/HealthConnectManager.kt — the only place the app touches Health Connect.
• ui/screen/loggedIn/workouts/health/HealthConnectRationaleActivity.kt — the in-app rationale screen.
• PRIVACY.md § "Health and fitness data (Health Connect)".
• docs/play-data-safety.md — the Data safety form, which Google cross-checks against this one.

Rejection 2 — the app contradicted this declaration, and what changed

Same policy code as the first: "Use of permission is not a permitted/valid use case … or potentially engages in a prohibited use."

The declaration above was not what failed. The app's own permission-rationale screen was. The My Fitness pivot rewrote this file and PRIVACY.md but never touched the strings behind HealthConnectRationaleScreen — which is the screen § 4 below points the reviewer at, and the screen Health Connect itself opens for ACTION_SHOW_PERMISSIONS_RATIONALE. It still read:

"Amethyst reads finished workouts so it can pre-fill a workout post for you."

"Amethyst is a Nostr social client. Its Workouts section lets you publish a summary of a finished workout to the Nostr relays you choose, so the people who follow you can see what you did."

That is the rejected first submission, verbatim, presented in-app as the official justification for the permission — and it reads as the prohibited "publicly displaying or socially sharing sensitive data." A reviewer who read this declaration and then opened the app was told two different things, and the app's version is the one that counts.

Three further contradictions on the same screen:

• every per-permission bullet justified the data type by what it puts in the post, not by the statistic My Fitness renders;
• it claimed a 7-day window and "only while the Workouts composer is open", against the 28 days and My Fitness that § 4 below claims (WorkoutStats.WINDOW_DAYS = 28 drives the dashboard; HealthConnectManager.LOOKBACK_DAYS = 7 only ever drove the composer);
• My Fitness was not named anywhere on it.

The permission-request card in the workout composer had the same problem — it was titled "Share your workouts".

Both surfaces now justify every permission by a statistic the dashboard shows the user, state the 4-week window and both screens that read, name My Fitness, and describe publishing only as an optional, per-item, explicitly-confirmed action under "What Amethyst does not do". The stale translations of those strings were deleted so every locale falls back to the corrected English until Crowdin re-translates.

The standing rule this cost us: the rationale screen, PRIVACY.md and this file are one document split across three places. A change to any of them is incomplete until the other two match — the reviewer reads all three.

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1. App functionality — background, not a form field

Google does not publish a matching field for this. Keep it as the brief for whoever fills the form, and as the source the § 3 blocks are written from; paste it only if the form offers a general description box. See the note at the top of § 3.

Amethyst is a social client for Nostr, an open decentralized social protocol. It also includes a fitness feature, My Fitness, which is what uses Health Connect.

My Fitness is a personal training dashboard. It builds a log of the user's own workouts — from the workouts their watch or fitness app has saved to Health Connect, and from the workout records they have logged in Amethyst itself — and turns it into a picture of how that person is training: how much they did this week and whether that is up or down on last week, how their time splits across running, cycling, walking, swimming and the gym, their best efforts, how many days they trained, and their current streak of consecutive active days.

The purpose is to help the user track, monitor, analyze and improve their own physical fitness. Health Connect is not a precondition for it: the dashboard works from the user's own logged workouts alone, and Health Connect is what lets it also count the sessions their watch recorded and show the device metrics — heart rate, steps and elevation — that a hand-entered workout does not carry. The numbers are shown to the person who recorded them. No part of the dashboard requires posting anything, and nothing is transmitted anywhere to produce it — the summary is computed on the device from Health Connect data and displayed.

Separately, and entirely optionally, a user who wants to tell their followers about a particular workout can tap "Share this workout" on a row of that dashboard. That opens a composer pre-filled with the workout's figures, which the user reviews and chooses to publish or discard. Sharing is a user-initiated action on top of the tracking feature, with per-post review and consent; it is never automatic, and the tracking feature is fully usable without it.

2. Reviewer walkthrough — use only if the form asks

Offer this where the form has a reviewer-notes, testing-instructions or demo field. If it has none, the walkthrough still matters: it is what someone testing the build should follow, and step 2 is the one that stops a reviewer landing on an empty dashboard.

1. Install and open Amethyst, and sign in (a key can be generated in-app).
2. Log one workout first, so the dashboard has something to summarise. Drawer → Feeds → Workouts → +. A review device's Health Connect database is usually empty, and an empty dashboard shows none of the statistics these permissions serve. This step needs no health permission at all.
3. Open the navigation drawer (hamburger, top-left). My Fitness is the second entry under You, the first section — directly below Profile. Tap it.
4. The screen explains what will be read and offers What Amethyst reads (the full rationale screen) and Connect. Tap Connect and grant the permissions. (If the account has already logged workouts in Amethyst, the dashboard is already populated from those and the Health Connect offer appears as a banner above it instead — the feature does not gate on the permission.)
5. The dashboard appears: "This week" totals with the change against last week; the streak, active-days and workout-count tiles; the four-week weekly average; the per-activity breakdown; best efforts; and the recent-workout list.
6. Everything above is the tracking feature. To see the optional sharing path, tap Share this workout on a row in Recent workouts — it opens a pre-filled composer that the user must confirm. The button appears only on workouts that have not been published yet, so a workout is never offered for sharing twice.

My Fitness can also be pinned to the bottom bar, under Settings, like any other destination.

Notes for testing:

• The dashboard summarises two sources: workouts read from Health Connect, and workout records the account has published from Amethyst. On a fresh device with an empty Health Connect database and an account that has never logged a workout, it correctly reports that nothing has been recorded — there is no data to summarise, which is not a failure of the feature.
• To see it populated, either grant Health Connect access on a device whose fitness app or watch has saved sessions in the last four weeks, or log one in the app: drawer → Feeds → Workouts → +. A workout logged that way appears in the dashboard without any health permission at all.

3. Per-data-type justification — paste these

How the form is actually shaped. Google does not publish the field labels for the declaration's second page, but its own guidance says that page is organised as expandable sections per data-type category — Activity and fitness, Body composition, Energy, Nutrition, Reproductive and sexual health, Respiratory system, Sleep management — each asking you to "provide an explanation of how your app uses each listed Health Connect data type."

So the form is organised by data type, not by narrative. There is no box that corresponds to § 1 below. Treat § 1 as background for whoever fills the form, and § 2 as something to offer only if the form gives you a general free-text or reviewer-notes field.

Which means each block below is written to stand alone. Every one names My Fitness, says what the data type contributes to it, and states the user benefit, so a reviewer who reads a single expandable section gets the whole argument without needing the others. Paste the block for a data type into that data type's box, whichever category heading the form files it under. Expect exercise, distance, steps and elevation under Activity and fitness, and both calorie types under Energy; heart rate lands wherever the form lists it (it is not in the published category list — you will see it when the form renders).

Do not condense these into one shared paragraph across boxes. A reviewer evaluating one data type should not have to infer the feature from another answer — that inference is what "lack of clear justification for the requested permissions" means in Google's published denial reasons.

READ_EXERCISE — ExerciseSession (and CyclingPedalingCadence)

Used by My Fitness, Amethyst's personal training dashboard, which summarises the user's own workouts back to them. This data type is the spine of that dashboard. Amethyst reads each session's activity type, start time and end time to produce: the count of workouts this week versus last week, total training time, the per-activity breakdown ("Cycling: 3×, 4h 10m"), the number of active days, and the consecutive-day training streak. Every other metric below is aggregated over the session's time window, so without this permission there is no notion of "a workout" to attach any statistic to and the feature cannot exist.

Benefit to the user: they can see how consistently and how much they are actually training, which is the basic question a training summary answers.

CyclingPedalingCadence is granted by Health Connect under this same permission. Amethyst does not read, store, or display cadence — it reads only ExerciseSessionRecord. There is no separate permission that grants one without the other.

READ_DISTANCE — Distance

Used by My Fitness, Amethyst's personal training dashboard. Aggregated per workout and summed into the distance figures it shows the user: distance this week, the percentage change against last week, the four-week weekly average, distance per activity, and the "Longest distance" best effort.

Benefit to the user: distance is the primary training-load measure for running, cycling, walking, hiking, rowing and swimming. Seeing this week's total against last week's is how a user knows whether they are building up or falling off.

READ_ACTIVE_CALORIES_BURNED — ActiveCaloriesBurned

Used by My Fitness, Amethyst's personal training dashboard. Aggregated per workout and summed into the energy figures it shows the user: calories this week and the change against last week. Active calories — energy burned by the activity, excluding resting metabolism — are the correct measure of a workout's cost.

Benefit to the user: a view of training energy expenditure over time, and whether it is rising or falling week to week.

READ_TOTAL_CALORIES_BURNED — TotalCaloriesBurned

Used by My Fitness, Amethyst's personal training dashboard, as the fallback for the energy figure described under ActiveCaloriesBurned. Several widely used watches and fitness apps record only total energy for a session and never write ActiveCaloriesBurned. Where active calories are missing, Amethyst uses total calories so the energy statistics are not simply blank for those users; where active calories exist they are always preferred, because total calories include basal burn and would overstate the workout.

Benefit to the user: the dashboard reports energy consistently regardless of which watch or app they use, instead of silently omitting the metric for a subset of devices.

READ_HEART_RATE — HeartRate

Used by My Fitness, Amethyst's personal training dashboard. Aggregated per workout into the average and maximum heart rate, then combined across the window into a duration-weighted average heart rate (so a two-hour ride weighs more than a ten-minute walk), a maximum for the period, the per-workout effort shown on each row of the recent list, and the "Highest heart rate" best effort.

Benefit to the user: heart rate is how a user distinguishes an easy week from a hard one at the same distance, and the standard signal for whether they are training too hard or too easily. It is the single most informative intensity measure the dashboard can show.

READ_STEPS — Steps (and StepsCadence)

Used by My Fitness, Amethyst's personal training dashboard. Aggregated per workout and summed into the weekly step average and the "Most steps" best effort it shows the user.

Benefit to the user: for walking and hiking — and for many users the majority of their activity — step count is the metric they actually track, and a weekly average is how they judge whether they are keeping it up.

StepsCadence is granted by Health Connect under this same permission. Amethyst does not read, store, or display cadence — it reads only the aggregated step count. There is no separate permission that grants one without the other.

READ_ELEVATION_GAINED — ElevationGained

Used by My Fitness, Amethyst's personal training dashboard. Aggregated per workout and summed into the weekly climb average and the "Biggest climb" best effort, and shown per workout in the recent list.

Benefit to the user: elevation is what separates a flat week from a hard hilly one at identical distance and time. Without it, a user training on hills sees no difference between a punishing week and an easy one, and the dashboard misrepresents their training load.

4. Scope and data handling

• Read-only. Amethyst holds no Health Connect write permissions and never writes to it.
• Foreground only. Reads happen only while the user has the My Fitness dashboard or the workout composer on screen. Amethyst does not request READ_HEALTH_DATA_IN_BACKGROUND and has no background worker, service or job that touches health data.
• Last four weeks only. The dashboard reads a rolling 28-day window. Amethyst does not request READ_HEALTH_DATA_HISTORY and cannot see anything older.
• No location. Amethyst does not request READ_EXERCISE_ROUTE and never receives the GPS track of a workout.
• No transmission to produce the feature. The dashboard is computed on the device and displayed. Nothing is uploaded to render it. The developer operates no server, so no health data is ever received, stored or processed by the developer or any third party acting for the developer.
• Sharing is separate, explicit and per-item. A user may choose to publish one workout as a post. That takes a deliberate tap, shows the user exactly what will be published, and requires them to confirm. It is never automatic, never bulk, and never a condition of using the tracking feature. Published posts go to the Nostr relays that user configured.
• No secondary use. Health data is never used for advertising, analytics, profiling, marketing or sale, never shared with data brokers, and never used to determine eligibility for insurance, credit or employment.
• No persistence beyond the session. The summary is held in memory while the screen is open. The only thing stored is whatever the user chose to publish, as an ordinary post.
• Revocable and optional. The user can revoke the permissions in Health Connect at any time — the dashboard immediately returns to its prompt — or turn the composer suggestions off under Settings → Compose Settings. The rest of the app is unaffected.
• In-app rationale. Amethyst handles ACTION_SHOW_PERMISSIONS_RATIONALE (Android 13 and below) and ACTION_VIEW_PERMISSION_USAGE + CATEGORY_HEALTH_PERMISSIONS (Android 14+), showing a screen that names My Fitness, lists each data type against the statistic it produces, states the 4-week read window and the two screens that read, and links the privacy policy. The same screen is reachable from "What Amethyst reads" before any permission is requested. Its wording matches this declaration — see "Rejection 2" above for why that is checked.
• Privacy policy: https://github.com/vitorpamplona/amethyst/blob/main/PRIVACY.md — see "Health and fitness data (Health Connect)".