Moves is so much more than a pedometer. In addition to keeping track of how many steps you take every day, the app can automatically recognize whether you’re walking, cycling or running, plus chart your route on a map and more. All you have to do is carry your iPhone in your pocket or in a bag.
Best of all, it visualizes your daily, weekly and monthly activity, allowing you to set and achieve simple goals for yourself. I’ll show you how it works after the jump.
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Before You Start
The best place to keep your device is in a pocket, bag, purse, hand or armband when using Moves. The app uses sensor and location information from your iPhone to recognize routes, places and activities such as walking, cycling or running (it also recognizes all motorized travel as general “transport”).
Moves runs in the background and automatically tracks your movements, such as walking, running and cycling.
A quick note about accuracy. To conserve battery, walks shorter than 30 seconds are not always counted. Also, if you’re on a bumpy car ride that makes your step count go up, know that they will most likely be eliminated later on, after the data has been analyzed by the app in more detail. And if you’re running or walking on a treadmill, of course the steps will be counted, although the distance will not be accurate. (Moves says it hopes to improve this feature in the future.)
The app automatically tracks all your movement from the background, which means tracking can be turned on and you are free to use your iPhone for anything you want. Of course, you can turn tracking on or off in the app from Settings at any time. If you have more questions about how Moves works — or even if you don’t necessarily have questions — I strongly encourage you to check out the FAQ under Settings, as it provides a little more insight into how the whole thing operates.
Bubbles and Storylines
When you open Moves, the app will show you data for today, with colored bubbles representing your different activities. Walking is green, running is purple and cycling is blue. If you do all three in the same day, all three will be displayed in proportion to how much time you spent on each activity. Tap on a bubble to cycle through the number of steps, minutes and miles.
Summary Bubbles can display your steps, minutes and miles. Your Storyline displays the day’s activity timeline.
Below your totals bubbles you’ll see your Storyline, complete with your day’s activities displayed chronologically. You’ll also see map thumbnails. Tap on any one to view your route and to enter more information about the location if you choose. The map will include a marker; tap it to view the time you spent exercising in that place and confirm the location (service provided by foursquare) or give it a name (Home, Work, etc.).
Tap on the map thumbnails to view your route and details, plus provide or confirm the names of places.
Are you and a friend or family member interested in a little friendly competition? Share your Summary Bubbles or Summary and Storyline with each other by tapping the Send button at the bottom of the screen. This gives you the option to send the information via an image by email or Twitter — go ahead and encourages your friends (or exercise your bragging rights).
Days and Weeks
At the top of the screen it says Today, and to the left of that there’s an arrow. Use the arrow to view data for previous days, or tap Today to view information for the week. (Hold the phone vertically or horizontally, whichever provides you with the view you like best.) At a glance, you’ll see all the days you were active, along with bubbles scaled according to your activity level. Tap on any day to view the complete information.
View your daily and weekly summaries, and even share them with friends via email or Twitter.
Remember that the app will only display information it gathered while tracking was on and you had your phone on your person. If you turned tracking off or left your phone on the kitchen table, your data obviously wasn’t recorded.
You can also alternate between Days and Weeks using the buttons at the bottom of the screen. Tap on any week to view reports for your total activity for that particular week; again, you can tap the Summary Bubbles to cycle through steps, minutes and miles. Share the information with your friends to see which of you met your goals for the week!
Moves will display your daily and weekly totals for you to compare at a glance, plus highlight your records.
Final Thoughts
Moves is very easy to use and visually appealing, with your information displayed via the sleek and colorful bubbles. To me, the day’s totals were more important and useful to me than the Storyline details, although it was occasionally interesting to learn how many minutes I’d been walking, or to see how my activity level increased or decreased throughout the course of a day.
I did notice that the app caused my battery life to decrease at a faster rate than usual, although in the realm of apps that run constantly in the background and heavily utilize GPS, Moves definitely isn’t the worst offender.
In fact, the app doesn’t use GPS when the iPhone isn’t moving at all, and it references GPS only off and on to detect movement speed and routes (this is why walks shorter than 30 seconds may not be recorded) — both of which help to conserve battery life. That said, what you use your iPhone for and how often you use it is going to make battery life vary from user to user. Regardless, the developers say they are working all the time to minimize battery consumption even further, so this aspect of Moves could see improvement.