App of the Month – Endomondo

It’s proven that maintaining a healthy lifestyle has significant benefits. By watching what we eat and incorporating exercise into our daily routine, staying healthy is an instant feel good that can help us avoid weight gain and improve our moods. However getting into shape and staying on top of it can be a tricky task for many. Luckily, whilst your Android device won’t do the job for you, there’s a whole range of Android apps that offer a helping hand, nudging us in the right direction and making our lives a little easier in the pursuit for fitness.

With the New Year in full swing, we decided to try out Endomondo – a popular fitness app powered by Under Armour that can track your physical activity and allow you to monitor your progress. Considered one of the best fitness apps on the market, Endomondo is even a favourite of retired boxer Carl Froch, who uses the app and his SmartWatch 3 to stay at the very top of his fitness game.

Not only can you track your fitness and performance, but the app also lets you record pep talks for your friends and create personal training plans.

We rated the app so highly that we decided to get in touch with Endomondo’s CTO, Morten, to find out a little more about the inspiration behind the app. Here’s what he had to say.

1. Can you describe Endomondo in 140 characters?

Endomondo is an awesome fitness tracker that makes your workouts more motivating and more social and helps your reach your fitness goals.

2.  What is it that makes Endomondo so unique?

Endomondo is about making it easy to track your physical activity and allowing you to monitor your progress. I personally love the simplicity of the mobile app and website! However, what really makes Endomondo unique is that it encourages you to share your physical activity with friends and family – allowing them to cheer you on and help you get and stay healthy.

3. Is there any personal inspiration behind the development of Endomondo?

Here at Endomondo, we all love the product. It’s developed to meet the needs of our users as well as our own, since most of us are runners and cyclists (with a few dancers, yogis and walkers on the team too). We are probably the most dedicated users ourselves!

The original idea behind the product was – and still is – to make it more fun and social to stay active and to fit our favourite sports like running into our busy schedules. That original idea is still what drives us, but along the way, we’ve also added features that can help our users improve their ability to run and become better athletes.

4. What advice would you offer to help people stay motivated to reach their fitness goals in 2016?

The most important thing is to set a realistic goal. Don’t shoot for an Ironman if the more accessible goal is to be able to run a 5K. Also, my own trick to succeed is to brag about my goal to colleagues, friends and family: It’s really hard to bail out if you’ve committed like that. I recommend trying out the “Commitment” feature on Endomondo – it’s a digital promise of your training that you make to yourself and to friends, which gives them a way to cheer you on through your app.

5. Boxer Carl Froch has been using the app on his Sony SmartWatch 3 to monitor his training and set himself targets to beat. In what other ways does the app provide motivation for runners?

Running is the most popular sport on Endomondo and so we have some great features that target runners specifically. My favourite one is our personal training plans, which can help runners set a goal to run longer distances or go faster and have the plan adapt to their fitness level as they go. We also have plans for non-runners who want to start running.

6. How do you go about developing new features for app? Is it a matter of straight innovation or do you have a lot of user feedback?

Actually, it’s both. Since we made the app to help our users, we listen to what they say and that helps us perfect our features. I.e. make them easier to use, make them look better, make our training plans easier or more difficult, etc. Other feature ideas come from our innovative colleagues – most of us are physically active and so when we run into something that we’re not currently addressing, we decide to find a solution that can help all of our users.

7. What new and upcoming features can we expect in the next few months?

We are constantly working hard on new features and design updates. Most are secret until we release them, but I can say that some nice design updates are coming to the mobile applications, so be on the lookout for them soon!

You can download Endomondo today from the Google Play Store.

 

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