My friends know, that I am a huge supporter of RunKeeper: I've convinced many of my friends to use the app (or the database), observe their activities, comment on their achievements, I also wrote articles on their blog, and even supervise IT diploma works related to RunKeeper. Still, I decided to uninstall the app today.
Our story started in March, 2013, when I decided to bring back some sport to my life. After a couple of years of break, I was really happy to find RunKeeper. Previously I had to manually edit my tracks to know how much I ran on Gmap-pedometer. These stone-age times were over, and I was off to my first morning run, where I immediately encountered some nice guys in the forest:
The audio-cue feature surprised me as well, and scared the deers away, but it was ok, I met them again a couple of kilometers later :-)
Anyhow, first I just used RK to track my runs, and later bike rides, skates, etc. Then, when I was in Morocco in the winter of 2014, I decided to manually enter my daily walks as well. As the time passed, I became more and more "professional" with the features of RK, and used it extensively in many different situations for almost 3 years. By extensively, I mean more than 1800 activities:
And I was happy with RunKeeper. It was not the ultimate flawless app I was longing for, but for me, it was still the best app on the market. In the beginning I was thinking about using Endomondo too, but RK won with its simple design, more serious attitude, and public API. When I bought my Pebble, using the app became even more comfortable.
So what happened then?
Basically two things:
First of all, I bought a Garmin. Yeah... If You do sports so frequently, it is a reasonable investment. So now, I only use my Fenix 2 to track my runs, rides, swims, etc.
Secondly, I was a bit disappointed with the direction the application was developed. I wouldn't say it was a bad decision. I only mean, that the new features did not make me happier, and in many cases just more unsatisfied. So it is only a personal opinion. I know things like mandarin version, and good branding are important, but I don't care about that. I wanted to see new features and bugfixes.
What I wanted to see:
- gear tracking (afaik now available, but only o nmobile, not on the web interface)
- normal interface for sleep tracking
- fixed autopause / route problem (see the link above)
- customizable Pebble interface
- activity search
- calendar view
- daily step integration
- fartlek workout sync
- customizable audio cues
- manuall adding of photos on the web interface
- etc.
What we got:
- New brand
- Breeze (now dead)
- New design
- Stopwatch mode
- minimap view in activity list (rendering the activity list totally useless)
- ranking of workout
- another new brand
- etc.
And again, I am not saying, these are bad developements, just not my taste. Also, I mostly don't use the application to check my stats, or view friends activities. I do that on my computer. What I want is a simple, lightweight tracker. But RunKeeper became a huge memory and storage eater. See the copmarison with AeroTracker Pro:
I know, the latter one is very simple, no audio cues, no photos, but that is kind of what I need. It works, it is fast, and does not load a lot of unnecessary things. Not the mention the customizable Pebble interface.
So that's it, is it a final break up?
Definitely not. With all of its problems, Healthgraph is still one of the best databases for activities. Also, the RunKeeper web interface is pretty neat, I especially like the manual track editing feature. So I still use the RunKeeper database and Web interface. Everything I track with my Garmin is synced to RK with tapiriik, and that's my main database (although I sync everything to Strava and Garmin Connect too).
That's it, sorry for the long post, here is a running potato:
So, what about You? Which application, gadget do You prefer? Let us know in the comments!
