Sometimes the only way you get something is to make it yourself. That is sort of what happened with Incompare. I have always wanted a fitness app on my iPhone that would quickly tell me how I was doing this year vs. last year for a particular fitness metric, such as steps taken, hours slept, number of hours spent running or swimming. There are a ton of apps that give you great statistical information about your health data. Apple’s own Health app is great. Strava, my fitness app of choice for tracking workouts, also has a lot of great analytical features. However, the only app that gave me a view that I was looking for is ‘Slopes’, a fantastic app that I use to track my skiing workouts. This app allows me to easily compare the current ski season to the last ski-season up to the current date and the whole prior season. I needed exactly that view but for all metrics and workouts I was interested in. I searched but didn’t find something that gave me quite what I wanted. Several apps came close but not close enough.
iOS App Development
I have dabbled in iOS development for many years but didn’t really finish a project that I wanted to push out to the app store. Either I was too ambitious in what I was trying to build or got bored midway. Also, the constantly changing tech and the move to Swift and then SwiftUI a few years ago was a big deterrent. And, above all, I didn’t really have an idea that I wanted to pursue that much. Probably because I was trying to build something that would be more useful to others than to me.
“Incompare” lets you compare health data to last year.
Bringing financial performance to fitness
A concept that is often very common while tracking financial performance is to look at “period-to-date” or relative date comparisons such as YTD (Year-to-date), or QTD (Quarter-to-date). These allow you to compare how you are doing this period (year or quarter or month) with same date range but for a prior period. So, for YTD – you’d compare how you did, say, from Jan 1, 2024 – to Jul 5, 2024 in comparison to Jan 1, 2023 – Jul 5, 2023. The great thing about YTD is that it takes seasonality into account automatically. And just like finance, seasonality is important in workouts. I love to swim but I only do so in the summers, and I love to ski but I only ski in the winters. So, if I want to know how I am doing for swimming, it is not very useful to me to see the trends for the last 12 months – which is what most apps, including Apple’s Health app and Strava show. I actually want to know what happened before a year ago. I want to know what happened in the same date range but for last year.
Compare view in ‘Slopes’ , an inspiration for “Incompare”
So, out of the need to solve this problem for me, was born “Incompare”, a super simple iOS app that tries to do just one thing and not much else. It shows you how you are doing on some key fitness metrics this year compared to same period last year. That’s it.
I started building this app in early June and I submitted it to the iOS App store at the end of June. After some rounds of back-and-forth with App Store review, the app was finally approved on the 18th of July. Not bad for a four-week turnaround from idea to general availability.
ChatGTP as a coding assistant
I knew what I wanted to do, but not exactly how. That’s where I took a lot of help from ChatGPT-4o. It was a great learning experience. It wasn’t as straightforward as one would think and there is no way I would have been able to use the code generated by ChatGPT if I didn’t know much about programming and debugging, it still made my life significantly easier. What it really made me do is get something done very quickly. On my own, it probably would have taken me several months to do this. With ChatGPT it took me just over a couple week with only a few hours a week. And since it is hard to sustain interest for a longer period of time, I might not have ever been able to distribute the app.
What’s next?
There are a lot of technical improvements and user experience improvements that I need to make. There are a few more features that I am thinking of adding. I don’t have a long roadmap. I wanted this app to remain simple and quick.
I am loving Incompare
This app is super useful to me and I now use it everyday. If think comparing fitness metrics to prior year might be useful to you - go download and check it out for yourself. I did not make this to make money or to collect anyone else’s data. I couldn’t care less. I just wanted it to be out there so I could use it. If anyone else can find joy or utility in this – that’s great. It is free. It is a small app. It is fast. It just does one thing. Go enjoy!