Anurag Yagnik

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Moves: A brilliantly simple and effective activity tracker app

Moves is one of the best activity tracker apps out there. It made me easily give up the Jawbone UP gadget and all other pedometer-style apps on the phone. Its beauty and effectiveness are largely in its simplicity and lack of feature bloat. It started out beautifully minimalistic and has been adding a few but well-executed featured every now and then. 

This is a bloated market and there are as many pedometer apps on the app store as many steps you can take in a day. Most are obsessed with clutter and try to give you way too much information. Moves almost goes the other direction - for the better. 

It has excellent location detection and tracking. Its integration with Foursquare for location information is fluid. The use of stark monochrome icons is also quite beautiful. It looks simple but right from its main screen to the few inner screens it offers clean, clutter-free and simple design. Like most things simple, it hides the complexity from the user and probably takes it upon itself. 

Consider its main activity tracking screen. It features colorful flat, circles and pill-shapes that show your locations and activities on a stark black background. It is a beautiful thing. You click anywhere on the shapes or the timeline and you get details. You can click the next/prior buttons on the details to sort of playback your moves. Lovely. I wish this could get automated some day so I can sit back and play my day or week and watch how it went. 

 

Compare to this a competitor like Saga. A bloated, social-obsessed app with a similar concept but utterly different implementation. It is one of those approaches that makes you think you are getting a lot but you actually end up getting less because most of what you get is not easily usable. 

I love Moves and highly recommend it specially if you have an iPhone 5s where it can utilize the specialized M7 motion sensor for even more accurate results.