Moves is a great app to help with tracking and enforcing your everyday physical activity.
If tracking your progress is important to improving (tip: it is) then Moves can help by showing you exactly what you’ve been doing and how that correlates to your aims.
Like a Nike FuelBand, Moves uses accelerometers to track your movement and give you a good understanding of how that relates to the real world, both in terms of number of steps and distance covered.
Where it by far exceeds the FuelBand is that as it uses your iPhone to track you, it also knows your speed and general motion. It transmits your data back to the developers’ servers which can (fairly accurately, in my experience) compare your data to others to decide whether you’ve been walking, running, cycling or even travelling by ‘transport’ – car, bus or train.
It’s also free! I have played with Moves for about a month now and it has shown itself to be far more accurate than my FuelBand for calculating my walking, for example.
It’s not perfect – at the moment, there’s no easy way to export your data, for example – but the biggest problem is that it is hungry.
Having your phone’s sat-nav system active all day drains the battery fast. I have an older phone and so its battery isn’t perfect, but I still found there were many days where the battery wouldn’t last until bedtime.
Ultimately, it was this that made me stop using the app – I found I spent longer worrying about needing to top-up my battery than I did about my activity level. However, I already own a FuelBand. If I didn’t have a personal tracker, I would almost certainly still be using Moves.
Rumour has it it that Apple may be building a smartwatch with personal tracking capabilities. Until then, Moves is the smartest personal tracker out.