The Story Behind Stroll, Our Simple Fitness App

Stroll is a simple fitness application. It shows how you’re doing against your daily goal and compares it with your friends & family on a leaderboard.

Our first app was Isle of Miles, a fitness game. The idea behind that was to make being healthy, as interesting and addictive as playing a mobile game. The game scored highly on key metrics like retention, engagement and effectiveness, and we received some clear feedback on how to evolve it further.

However, there was another clear message from a segment of our users: “I love your app, but the game is getting in the way.” We were surprised by that. If there were no game, Isle of Miles was just a fitness app and there are hundreds of those. Why don’t they use one of those? Feeling curious, we explored the fitness app landscape, but couldn’t find one that we loved to use. Many were okay, but all of those fell into one of these categories:

1. Made for athletes. Most of the popular ones are targeted at athletes who are already healthy. These treat everybody like they’re athletes. Many require you to start and stop an activity manually. Most track too many things and are overloaded with features.

2. Uninspired. Mind-numbingly boring would be a better description.

3. Closed. If you use one tracker and your friend uses another, there is no easy way to have fun together.

I love going for walks. Sometimes it relaxes me and sometimes it energizes me with a lot of new ideas. I don’t want to start and stop an app, and I don’t want to know the route I had walked. The rest of the team and many of the users we talked to also held a similar view.

The main thing I want my fitness app to tell me is whether I’m moving enough. In addition, if I had a good week I want to remind my friends how superior I am. If they’re doing well, I want to give them a thumbs up (in reality, I usually threaten them to slow down and stay behind me on the leaderboard).

We understood what our users were talking about. Stroll is our take on what a simple fitness app should be. It is available now on the App Store, and the Android version is coming soon. Let us know how we did. Now, let’s go for a stroll…