Tech startups change a lot, when you use something one and off over a long period of time, I find it difficult to navigate within their ecosystems.<p>As for sports tracking, there are a few reasons I can see to use them: Social, Health, Visualization, & Data collection/management<p>Maybe a little off topic for some, but here is my experience with sports tracking after using a couple of different solutions during the past 10 years:<p>I like Endomondo, and joined fairly short after they launched the website.<p>They have had a pro version, a plus version, and now a premium version.
Just when the app launched, I bought the paid version from the app store, which was a single payment and I liked to support a new, and in my case local, initiative.<p>One thing which was really nice with particularly this app, was the audio feedback, while running, so no need to look at a screen to get the lap time, pace, heart rate, etc.<p>I don't use the social features a lot, but it seems that Strava[0] now dominates in this space, I have tried their app, but I don't like their data vis, and find their privacy/sharing permissions to distracting to modify to suit my preference.<p>I have since moved to using a running watch from Garmin and don't really rely on the tracking capability of a smartphone.<p>Now I have copied my running activities to runalyze[1] a project which used to have all their code base on github in their earlier days. They do a fantastic job at visualizing data from both my watch and surprisingly also very well from 3rd party footpod powermeters[2], they do this much better than Garmin does on their own website[3] because they overlay right and left shoe on the same graph. They do on the other hand, not have 'social' features, but you can generate a public sharable URL.<p>Luckily, Garmin is a pretty big company, and the will hopefully not close their service any time soon, but it bothers me a little that on my newer watch, 920XT, I need data connection to extract my activities from my watch directly directly to their platform in order to view it.<p>On my old 910XT, it was possible to extract activities to my laptop, or even to my phone with a 3rd party app[4] and an ANT+ chip. There was even a nice app for viewing activities locally on the device [5] - a really nice solution if you don't have a data connection, and you are using an older watch with an android phone.<p>Over all, I have been very happy with Garmin, just with the tiny exceptions of need for online sync, and the decision to remove support for their temperature sensor data field.<p>-cheers<p>[0] <a href="https://www.strava.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.strava.com/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://runalyze.com/" rel="nofollow">https://runalyze.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://runscribe.com/" rel="nofollow">https://runscribe.com/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://connect.garmin.com/" rel="nofollow">https://connect.garmin.com/</a><p>[4] <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quantrity.ant2net_pro" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quantrity....</a><p>[5] <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sk.flashdev.gcviewer.pro" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sk.flashdev.gc...</a>