Step by Step

A Love Letter to the Fitbit Ultra, A Six Tracker Showdown, and My Dream Activity Tracker

In May 2013 at a Theophilus London show in Prospect Park I reached my hand down to my pocket to check my step count like I had hundreds of times before. This time my daily companion for the past year and a half, the Fitbit Ultra, was missing.

I had lost it before, mostly in the laundry, and was sure I could find it again. Panicked, I searched around the sprawled out blankets and damp grass. It was getting dark, the crowd had swelled, and beverages had been consumed. No luck. It was gone for good this time.

Depressed, I walked back to my apartment after the show without a clue as to how many steps I had taken that day.

Look at those curves.

I miss the pager jokes my friends made, the flower visualization that grew as you added steps, and the strange display that didn’t look like it was a display until it came alive, rotating through screens with the tap of its singular button.

I racked up 6,868,612 steps with the Fitbit Ultra before I lost the damn thing.

6,868,612 steps mostly taken in Boulder, CO and New York City. I was completely sedentary from August 2013 to December 2014.

Prior to Apple introducing the M7 using your phone as a pedometer was annoying. Activity trackers caused way too much battery drain. I tried a few apps including Moves on old iPhones, but the value didn’t outweigh the battery tax.

An old-fashion six tracker showdown.

Since picking up an iPhone 6 at the end of 2014 I’ve been trying a bunch of activity tracking apps and thanks to the M7 the battery drain has been negligible. My goal was to find an app that I liked as much as I liked the Fitbit Ultra back in the day.

After three months of testing I’m not super impressed by any of the activity tracking apps available for the iPhone today. I like bits and pieces of each, but there isn’t a single one that thrills me.

Breeze comes the closest. Moves would take the cake if it actually worked on my iPhone and hadn’t been abandoned after the team behind it was acquired by Facebook. I like the focus Human puts on minutes over steps and its great design.

The Reviews

Of Course I Made a Spreadsheet

Breeze wins, followed by Human and Fitbit. A year ago when Moves still worked on my phone it probably would have scored around a 4, and that’s the problem with this scoring system. It was far and away my favorite tracking app when I was using it daily and it worked well.

In my mind there are four areas that are important to an activity tracking app: tracking, reminders, motivation, and learning.

1. Tracking: reporting data as soon as the app is opened, without delay.
2. Reminders: notifications and emails that remind you to get up and move.
3. Motivation: goal setting so you’re chasing a target and social so you’re not chasing it alone.
4. Learning: visualizations that help you spot patterns and trends in your activity, recommendations that encourage you based on data, and exports so you can explore on your own if you’re so inclined.

Based on this criteria, here’s the skinny on each app I tested.

1. Breeze

First I was an owl, then I was a dolphin, and finally I’m a fox. It’s 2015 and an activity tracking app tells me my spirit animal.

The Good: goal setting is dynamic based on past activity. This is genius. It’s way less arbitrary than 10,000 steps and adjusts daily to nudge you in the right direction. The historical view is a nice long bar chart, and the spirit animal is a nice, odd, touch.

The Bad: limited map views that can only be access from an unpredictable in-app inbox.

The Ugly: it’s all single player mode, which is odd given how good the Runkeeper app is at social.

2. Human

How cool would it be if that background was dynamic based on where I walk?

The Good: the design is beautiful. The minutes of activity metric is intriguing and feels more –human–than steps taken. Unlocking new backgrounds is decent motivation.

The Bad: goal setting is limited to 30, 60, 90, or 120 minute stale intervals.

The Ugly: the new social features are a step in the right direction but there’s no social or address book look-up to find friends.

3. Fitbit

Bronze medal!

The Good: it’s the original smart activity tracker and gives me good vibes from the Fitbit Ultra days. The social features are solid.

The Bad: you have to open up the app and wait before it shows progress.

The Ugly: given Fitbit’s head-start on just about everyone I wish they would be further ahead on the software side. They have a decent web app, but they could be doing so much more cool stuff like smart recommendations.

“You just walked the length of the Suarez Canal”

4. Withings

Shamed by an app.

The Good: best recommendations and insights of any of the apps tested (see left). Fun insights like “Which city matches your lifestyle?” Answer: Hamburg. Or “You just walked the length of the Suarez Canal”.

The Bad: it takes so long to sync if I haven’t opened the app in a few days I normally close it before I learn anything new.

The Ugly: despite the smartest insights of any of the apps tested, everything else about it feels meh.

5. UP

The Good: the flexible trends section comes close to Moves for visualizing data.

The Bad: So. Long. To. Sync.

The Ugly: It’s confusing that Jawbone has one app for people using the physical tracker and one app for people tracking with their phone.

6. Moves

The Good: the simplicity and clean design of Moves is admirable. They were early to the game and proved a tracker didn’t need to be a physical device and could live exclusively on your phone.

The Bad: since getting acquired by Facebook and claiming they wouldn’t change their terms of service around data privacy they have in fact changed their TOS around data privacy.

The Ugly: they’ve abandoned the app and bugs now make it unusable.

April 25th: Moves App says they won’t commingle data with Facebook. May 5th: Moves App says they will commingle data with Facebook.

My Dream
Activity Tracker

Fitbit Ultra meets iPhone

After all that complaining I can’t standby without sharing some ideas. My dream activity tracker would be an iPhone app that improved upon the glory of the Fitbit Ultra. Here’s how it would work.

• Tracking: as soon as you open the app the most recent data would be visible. Accurate classification of walking vs. running vs. moving in a vehicle.
• Goal Setting: your daily goal would dynamically adjust based on historical activity. Imagine if it was smart enough to back-off a bit when the weather was crap. If you reached your daily goal before noon you could bump it up for the rest of the day.
• Recommendations: imagine smart tips delivered via push-notifications, in-app, and over email. Examples: your progress towards a daily goal, your progress relative to friends, encouragement to walk when you might otherwise drive or take public transportation, letting you know when you’ve reached a milestone.

“You took the subway to work the last three days.
Why not wake up early tomorrow and walk?”

• Visualization: your daily progress could be visualized over longer time periods. Maybe you could do something awesome like visualizing where you walked versus took public transportation, biked, or drove.

My co-founder at Next Big Sound, Samir, visualized all of his 2014 Moves data in New York. Pink is moving in a vehicle, blue is walking.

• Exports: easy reliable CSV downloads or an API.
• Social: you could import your address book or social graph from Twitter or Facebook to see your progress relative to friends.
• Notifications: smart, non-annoying, push notifications.
• Emails: a regular email would summarize your progress and provide recommendations.

1st Draft Sketches of
My Dream Activity Tracker

Friends and their daily progress across the top, flower visualizing progress in the center, and a bar graph visualizing your 21 day trend at the bottom. Flower icon by Milky.

Now it’s blue. And animated!

I’m excited for the ways we’ll be able to make passively tracked personal data useful in the future. There’s so much we can learn about ourselves that we might otherwise miss because of our natural biases.

Activity trackers are an awesome playground for learning about ourselves through data. There’s huge room for the design, experience, and intelligence of activity tracking products to progress.

Or maybe the Apple Watch will leapfrog everything.