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Moving from a Galaxy S2 to the new Nexus 5, built by Google and LG, is a huge paradigm shift that has changed my life. What it came with this change was a set of apps that I have been using extensively. One of these is the Moves App, which I have already mentioned when we were talking about Wristbands and how insane that world can be. Moves is an activity tracking app that doesn’t need any gadget, it simply runs on Android or iOS.
Moves is about tracking what you do during the day, how many steps you have made, where you have been and what you have done. The accuracy of this app is remarkable, which is higher than most of the smart wristbands on the market. However with great accuracy comes a pretty decent battery usage, which is not that bad, but it could be improved in the next years. The company, last year, has raised more than $1.6M and launched a second paid version on the Apple store.
What Moves solves is what wristbands are trying to achieve but with a single unique device, your phone. This company has showed us that we don’t need another device, we don’t have to turn it on or off and we don’t need to charge anything, apart from our phone. Although these are great things, it’s also true that our phone is not always with us, especially when we are at home or in places where we can leave it on a desk without worrying too much.
At the moment, a year later after having launched, the app has been downloaded more than 3 million times, which makes it the most successful tracking app in the market. The question is how do you monetize an app like this? The company has decided to start selling their second version that has been introduced in the Apple store for $2.99. Further by partnership with other apps and selling the data they are collecting, a good stream of revenues can be created out of nothing.
What this company knows about you is everything. By looking at the data, they can even start selling you beer if they know you are next to a pub on friday night. After days and days of tracking, they can exactly predict where you will be. Is this scary? It’s not if we can trust who’s tracking us and this is just the way technology is developing and if we can trust the company, we gain a lot of advantages by being tracked.
I believe that this app won’t sink because they are executing in the right way and doing what they are supposed to do. However they should improve their battery usage and partner with other relevant products or app to make the whole experienced more interesting. Knowing that I have walked 8,000 steps today is cool, but it’s cooler if the app can offer me a reward for having achieved that.
In the next months this team has to carefully pay attention at the next smart watches, because as soon as the technology is there, they need to move also on this platform. If I had Moves on a smart watch, everything would be simpler and the watch would be always with me, which means that the accuracy would increase compared to a smart phone. The technology and an accurate product are on the table, what they have to do now is to create more user engagement with the app and make money.
