I did some work on the best sports apps (run/walk/bike/tri) in mid-2015 for one of my non-the5krunner projects and decided to revisit and update some of the stats from 2015-2017 with figures to the end of 2018.

The results make very interesting reading for me and some of the winners and losers might be surprising to us all.

The stats below (and to the right) are of sports apps showing the number of ratings and the current aggregate review rating. So we have some indication of the user base as well as the engagement of the user base.

For those of us who like to think we are athletes to some degree, it is humbling to see the sheer numbers of people using the likes of Runtastic, Nike and Fitbit who probably aren’t athletes. We are in the minority…BIG TIME. I also have stats for the approximate number of installs and, for example, Runtastic and Garmin are both over 10million. Wow !

Winners – Increased Ranking based on #Reviews

This is a measure of growth compared to the competition

• Endomondo, Fitbit ++, STRAVA, Garmin Connect ++, MapMyFitness Walk+Ride, Runtastic MTB, Jawbone Up, Polar Beat, Suunto Movescount ++, UA Record,

Considering that Nike have a tie-in with Apple, it’s quite likely that if we had aggregate data for both the Android and iOS/WatchOS platforms that Nike would be doing very well indeed.

Losers – Decreased Ranking based on #Reviews

• Runkeeper, Google Fit, Sports Tracker, MapMyFitess Run, Runtastic Road Bike+MTB Pro,  Ride With GPS

Winners – Based on Increase in Aggregate Rating

This is a measure of user satisfaction and these are the apps that people think have improved

• Garmin Connect, Polar Flow/Beat,  Suunto Movescount, Training Peaks

Losers – Based on Decrease in Aggregate Rating

In previous years several apps falling into this category soon stopped entirely eg TomTom. Just sayin’.

• Fitbit, Google Fit, Jawbone Up, Runtastic MTB/Road Pro, Wahoo Fitness, RideWithGps,

Winners – Based on the %age increase in the number of Reviews

This is a measure of growth based on the previous position of the company/app.

• Garmin Connect, Polar Flow/Beat, Suunto Movescount, Training Peaks.

Overall Winner

Based on that data I would have to reluctantly declare Garmin Connect the winner.

I use the word ‘reluctantly’ as I think they should be doing even better with the usability of their Connect app.

Commentary

My opinion would be that these stats may also give an oblique insight into how well the various companies hardware devices are selling.

It would be no surprise that we could draw the conclusion that Garmin is selling more devices. However there are many rumblings about Polar and Suunto’s products. Yet these stats go some way to dispelling the rumblings and, conversely, suggesting that Polar and Suunto may well be doing quite nicely indeed.

Even Fitbit could be notably growing on the back of sales of Ionic and Versa devices. Yet a fall in the rating of their app tallies with my experience. At one time, Fitbit seemed to work for me on any platform but my remaining memory from last year is problems with pairing and problems getting a simple mp3 onto a device.

A final comment would be that the aggregate rating is surprisingly constant from one year to the next. Perhaps that is a reflection that the vast majority of those user ratings would come from over a year ago and therefore the aggregate rating figure is hard to shift? Probably. But then that also puts Fitbit decline into somewhat more of a stark perspective ie the last year’s worth of Fitbit’s ratings must have been poor.

Data – Android – Google Play

If I’ve missed some please let me know and I will add them if they have more than 1000 reviews.

The image above is of the same data but the colour coding on that image aids readability.