Nike announced Friday the opening of a developer portal for the Nike+ API. At the same time, the company announced a partnership with popular calorie-tracking and weight loss app Lose It!

Although Lose It! currently integrates with several other devices, including the Fitbit line of activity trackers and the Withings connected weight scale, Lose It! will be the first third-party app to integrate data from the Nike+ FuelBand.

"The Nike integration is deeper than some of our other tracker integrations," Patrick Wetherille, Lose It!'s Vice President for Product Marketing told MobiHealthNews. He said devices like the Fitbit merely log the calories burned with the tracker. The FuelBand integration adds a new metric to the Lose It! app's main dashboard. Users can select NikeFuel as an additional target when setting up personal goals or challenges with friends, according to a post on the Lose It! blog.

Lose It!, which is available on iOS devices, Android devices, and the web, has long been one of the most downloaded weight loss apps and Nike+ is the dominate platform for exercise tracking.

"We try to integrate the Fuel throughout Lose It! as much as possible," Wetherille said. "Any place where people can use traditional logging metrics, we're basically adding Fuel in as one of the metrics people can use."

Wetherille said that Nike embraced the partnership with Lose It! because they don't have very much interest in including food logging as a feature for Nike+ users.

"They don't see the FuelBand as being a product that's primarily used for weight loss," Wetherille said.

Integration with Nike+ will be available for users of the free and premium versions of the app, initially. However, Wetherille said both Fitbit and Withings integration began as free features and were moved over to the premium version about a year later. He estimated that about 10 to 15 percent of premium Lose It! customers use the app in conjunction with a tracking device.

In similar news, BodyMedia, makers of the BodyMedia FIT armband, announced a partnership with online fitness and weight loss community Sparkpeople.com. The partnership will initially allow BodyMedia users to automatically upload their tracking data to their SparkPeople accounts. In the future, calorie data logged in SparkPeople will also be exportable to the BodyMedia system.