Competing with Apple

This year during WWDC 2019 Apple has shown many new cool things, and as usually Apple did introduce features, which directly compete with already existing applications created by 3d party developers on AppStore. I wrote a small piece about two of such feature here.

However, from the perspective of SolidBalance developer there were two particular things which directly target our application:

Activity Trends (Apple Watch)

The latest trend in fitness. Yours. Your Activity rings are a great snapshot of your Move, Exercise, and Stand metrics throughout the day. But your watch captures so much more, from walking pace to flights climbed to VO2 max. The new Trends feature shows whether any metric is headed up or down over time, so you can keep it going or turn it around.

A more personalized Health app (iOS)

It’s easier than ever to access the information that matters most to you. And now there’s cycle tracking to help you gain insight into your menstrual cycle and provide a clearer picture of your overall health.

The main idea behind SolidBalance was to provide personal insight into the user’s health using ML and statistics. Based on data accumulated during time create a feedback loop for a customer to understand in which direction she/he moves, and add some suggestions about the path.

From Apple notes:

A more personal Health app. For a more informed you.

It’s easier than ever to access the information that matters most to you. Now you can see automatically generated highlights of how your health data is trending over time.

All of this sounds to us like literal implementation of our idea.

Or take for instance SolidBalance insight page where you can see an overview of last 7, 30, and 360 days of your activity:

And compare that to Apple notes:

Activity Trends

Get a view of your long‑term progress with key activity metrics, comparing the last 90 days with the last 365 days. If you’re starting to trend down, you’ll get personalized coaching to get back on track. See trend data for active calories, exercise minutes, stand hours, stand minutes, distance, flights climbed, workout walk pace, workout run pace, and cardio fitness level measured by VO2 max.

Do not get me wrong, time spend on our application was around 100 hours, and in our internal notes about this idea, we had a concern that his idea most probably will be hijacked by Apple in near future.

Moreover, I take this personally as a good sign that I and the team together were on the right side of history. We came up with a great idea, implemented it very very fast, and provided value to all those people who installed SolidBalance.

While it is unclear what are the next steps with SolidBalance, we already started to work on next idea and will keep you posted.

Thank you all of using our application, and for a feedback which you provided us.

Solid Balance is available today in the AppStore. If you have a moment, please vote for us on Product Hunt.

P.S. We would be happy to see comments according to mistakes & typos.