
Under Armour dumped an app - mjohn
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-05/under-armour-dumped-its-app-and-consumers-feel-the-heartbreak
======
adaisadais
Under Armour still owns a lot of digital assets (1). I think this set back
will help UA prepare for future successes.

Bold Prediction: I think by 2035 neither Nike, Adidas, or Under Armour will be
the dominant shoe brand. I believe we will have a new company which will
change the game dynamically. A new Apple or Tesla of shoes.

(1)
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/under-a...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/under-
armour-is-becoming-a-tech-company-2015-6)

~~~
sputknick
not a crazy prediction. My prediction: Amazon. I have a few pairs of their
branded shoes. Simple, cheap, effective. People will eventually realize the
newest neat-o feature in the latest shoes are not that big a deal.

~~~
_jal
> People will eventually realize the newest neat-o feature in the latest shoes
> are not that big a deal.

Absolutely. Any day now, humans will lose their taste for novelty and fashion.

Invest in burlap!

~~~
wmeredith
People do this all the time. It's called your forties and it's when marketers
stop caring about you.

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SQueeeeeL
What a disingenuous title, they're killing some small app, not MFP which is
the one people commonly use

~~~
hurricanesugar
Agreed, although the idea of MyFitnessPal being killed for a moment activated
my long-held desire to build an alternative. MFP is bloated, locked down
(without a premium subscription) and the UX lacks thoughtfulness in many
painful ways (two examples: navigating between diary dates and viewing
macronutrients per meal).

~~~
Topgamer7
I know there are at least 2 popular alternatives. My only real complaint of
MFP is it takes like a full minute to start up. Don't know if its because I
run adblock on my phone, and they have a long timeout to some metrics
endpoint. But its a minor annoyance.

~~~
Spivak
I feel like $45/yr is basically nothing for an app I use constantly every day.
Do those minutes not add up for you?

~~~
Topgamer7
Nah, I'm usually doing something else while I log. So I just pay attention to
that for a minute. They already data mine my input I'm sure, as well as there
are ads. I can find something better to spend $3 on per month.

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nradov
It's just really tough to compete in the fitness tech market. The total
addressable market size isn't huge. And over the last few years Garmin has
thrown tremendous resources into it and launched so many new products that
smaller competitors were squeezed out. Wahoo, Suunto, Coros, and Polar are
still hanging on with small market shares in devices and Strava may survive as
an independent app. Nike tried and gave up. Fitbit was slowly dying and got
rescued by a Google acquisition. But anyone else is going to have to come up
with a real disruptive innovation to have a chance of long term survival.

~~~
762236
It is tough. One of the nice things about the Garmin universe is that they
have a foundation of open standards that help with interoperability and
forward continuity if parts of that universe close. The FIT file format is
open. The ANT+ protocol is open I believe, but devices can also use BLE which
is open. If I preserve all of my FIT files, and Strava decided to close down,
I could upload them all to Training Peaks or an alternative site. I've already
written my own analysis software which didn't require permission from any
website for access to my data. My Garmin device gives me access to the FIT
files without requiring a cloud service.

~~~
nradov
The ANT+ protocol and FIT file format are sort of open. They are well
documented and available to everyone. Multiple independent companies do
contribute. But ultimately they are controlled by Garmin; they aren't true
open standards like WiFi, TCP/IP, or HTML.

[https://www.thisisant.com/](https://www.thisisant.com/)

~~~
ISL
Agreed. When I have tried to work with it [1], the format has been anything
but open. It's been a mixture of other people's libraries and reverse-
engineering to make Garmin files work for my needs.

There is an SDK with a license agreement that is probably more descriptive,
but the license terms are not what one expects from measurement
instrumentation.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15825838](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15825838)

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dadarepublic
Sneakerhead here. This is tangental but related. The core of Under Armor's
problem is design. The market is simply not excited by UA's offerings. This
cascades throughout their ecosystem - this app included.

UA sells shoes, no question. Just not to sneakerheads.

Think of it this way, I remember as web engineer, when engineers were
installing Chrome on family members computers to get them off the built-in
browser. Chrome was far better (at the time) and the core audience - engineers
- helped Chrome ascend to the status as most widely used browser
([https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
share](https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share)).

Nike, Adidas, and recently New Balance have just consistently produced more
exiting designs beyond the initial hype machine.

A simple look at the StockX resale market reflects that.

I'm not surprised this app failed. UA is a big brand and, no doubt this will
not kill them. But they aren't an 'exiting' brand. Focus on the core product -
that marketing that the core product design provides effects all their efforts
- this app included.

~~~
gknoy
I hope you'll forgive my ignorance, but what do you (as a "sneakerhead") look
for in shoe design? Is this a matter of visual aethetics, or of
performance/support metrics? I buy shoes relatively rarely, and usually end up
getting something similar to what I had before, so I feel like I have no idea
what "good design" even means in a shoe, any more than I would consider design
of a screwdriver.

Obviously, such good design exists -- I like one cordless drill better than
the other, for example -- but often time good design is not immediately
obvious. What are the hallmarks of good shoe design that you look for? What
excites you about one shoe vs another, and that prompts you to buy specific
shoes rather than whatever happens to fit at $store?

~~~
awad
It's not necessarily one or the other but definitely skews towards the
aesthetics/fashion element. That said, the best designed sneakers often rank
highly on both of those dimensions. Another poster mentioned Nike's rise in
running shoes. They're highly functional, often the best in the game, but also
designed with enough attention to aesthetics to be seen on the foot of many
executives in their day to day lives. That's good design.

To the gp's point, the single pair of UA sneakers I own are highly functional
and sport-specific that only come out at the gym...but picking them out of a
crowd of UA's lineup is difficult.

~~~
dole
To sneakerheads, fashion and aesthestics value far more than function and
performance. Sneakerheads being a [large] subset of the current streetwear
trend, exclusivity is another major factor for inflated prices in streetwear
and sneakers.

Timed and location specific drops of exclusive, limited edition, special
colorway variants of shoes, clothes and all other types of popular gear raises
value. As mentioned, StockX majorly drives the market, and the exclusivity
leads the savvy (or obsessed) consumer to seek advantages over others: bots,
bulk buying, captcha solving, DDoSing, proxies, and the usual exploits are
employed. The prices and value may be ridiculous but obviously, it's worth it
to someone and there's lots of money to be made.

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kjakm
I really don't understand why they can't just stop selling the hardware but
continue supporting the app and introduce a way to move data from it to one of
their other products. They're a big enough company they can shoulder the cost
of this. In fact - it should be considered an investment in not losing future
business. Failing to do it just shows disdain for their customers.

~~~
sbarre
I'll never understand why they won't invest even a small amount to provide
basic data export (make it a CSV!) of whatever customer data they have.

Most people won't use it, but for those who want it, they can have it..

Someone should start a "service shutdown customer data export as service"
business.. :-)

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neonate
[https://archive.md/xO3xd](https://archive.md/xO3xd)

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sm4rk0
For curious, this is the actual news from the title:

The company quietly pulled its UA Record app from both Google Play and Apple's
App Store on New Year's Eve. In an announcement dated sometime around January
8, Under Armour said that not only has the app been removed from all app
stores, but the company is no longer providing customer support or bug fixes
for the software, which will completely stop working as of March 31.

Source:

[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2020/01/smart...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2020/01/smart-scale-goes-dumb-as-under-armour-pulls-the-plug-on-
connected-tech/)

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buboard
Better to quit the experiment early before the damage becomes big enough to
hurt the brands image.

------
jbj
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.

As for sports tracking, there are a few reasons I can see to use them: Social,
Health, Visualization, & Data collection/management

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:

I like Endomondo, and joined fairly short after they launched the website.

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.

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.

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.

I have since moved to using a running watch from Garmin and don't really rely
on the tracking capability of a smartphone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

-cheers

[0] [https://www.strava.com/](https://www.strava.com/)

[1] [https://runalyze.com/](https://runalyze.com/)

[2] [https://runscribe.com/](https://runscribe.com/)

[3] [https://connect.garmin.com/](https://connect.garmin.com/)

[4]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quantrity....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quantrity.ant2net_pro)

[5]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sk.flashdev.gc...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sk.flashdev.gcviewer.pro)

~~~
nradov
You can plug Garmin devices into a USB port and copy the FIT files directly to
your computer.

~~~
jbj
what an obvious solution! Thanks

