There is probably no other app on my iPhone that is as useful as Fitness. It is also the iPhone app most likely to drive me crazy. This is a pretty two-sided story, so let me explain.
I approach exercise with the same enthusiasm as a cat takes a bath. We’ve decided that we’re not doing each other much good. But my wife and daughter have decided, perhaps unwisely, that they want me to be around for the long haul, so I’m going to exercise.
Fitness, added to the iPhone as part of the iOS 16 update, is one of my main motivators to get up and exercise. With Fitness, you can set a daily exercise goal, and the app will dutifully track your steps and distance traveled until you meet that goal and complete your exercise rings. Fitness does all this without the help of your Apple Watch, which is good news for anyone who doesn’t want to spend $249+ to track what they’re doing at bayonet point.
To help you keep moving, fitness offers badges — little graphic rewards for hitting your daily goal for the week or completing the requirements of a monthly challenge. The notion of gamification might irk some people, but for me it’s an effective motivator.
Fame, power, money, other people’s love: I’ve never desired any of these things as much as I hope that a fitness app on my phone will virtually praise me.
And here’s my fitness frustration: the app can be a bit slow when it comes to giving out kudos, and that’s enough to send me climbing a tree (assuming the fitness app remembers to add the distance I climbed the tree to my Move goal).
Pictured above is the trophy case of the Monthly Challenge badges I earned at the beginning of July. The keen-eyed will notice that there is no badge for June 2024. Perhaps Phil didn’t complete the requirements for the challenge?
Readers, I definitely accomplished that. My June challenge was to exceed my average calorie burn for the month by 14 times. I won’t bother counting all the closed rings in the screenshot above, but I completed the challenge 25 times. Last time I checked, 25 was over 14 times. Give dad a badge.
Even more frustrating: I had two perfect weeks in June when I worked out and made sure to close the ring, and the fitness app claims my last perfect week was at the end of May, which is indisputable.
I’ll be the first to say that getting excited about this is pretty silly. Oh, so the baby doesn’t get his precious badge? But I do recall Apple stepping up efforts to help track health data and surface actionable trends that are visible to everyone from patients to doctors. It’s an ambitious goal that could empower more people to take control of their health if the data is collected and communicated in a trustworthy way. And seeing the delayed response to something as simple as gamified exercise data makes me less confident.
In other words, if a fitness app sometimes stumbles when asked to determine whether completing seven Move Rings constitutes a perfect week, can we really trust a larger health app to handle more complex data better? This may be an unfair question, but it reflects the tracking experience I had with Apple’s software.
I ended up updating my iPhone 12 to the iOS 17.6 public beta and the badge appeared. I wonder if the fact that I have multiple iPhones running different software versions is causing the fitness app to affect some of my Move data. I’m sure it’s not. The iPhone 12 is the only one I take with me when I work out, so I don’t know what’s going to happen.
That said, I find it odd that I have to check for software updates when my Move badges aren’t showing up when they should, or that my wife keeps having to restart her Apple Watch when it stops sending data to the fitness app on my phone. These things should simply just work, especially if Apple wants to be taken seriously as a monitor of your health and fitness information.
That being said, I’m really glad I have a fitness app on my iPhone; I’d be less active without it. I just hope Apple realizes that gamification without immediate rewards doesn’t work in the long run, and I’m hoping that the July 2024 badge appears the moment I tighten up the appropriate number of Move rings.