sensotrend - making sense of diabetes trends

So long, Sports Tracker

Last week, I had the privilege to attend to the Sports Tracker Innovation Night. The event was targeted to people like me, with a CTO role in startup companies, or something close to that. I went there with great expectations. Is this the moment they finally open their API?

The first time I asked Sports Tracker for an API to access some of the exercise data was at Slush 2013, almost three years ago. I could hear from the answer that many other people and companies had asked for that too, and plans are currently being made for making an API available. I’ve repeated the question occasionally since then, and the answer has always been that the API is being planned, designed, or even built.

During the event, it became somewhat evident that an API is not being built. The presentation I saw (there were several presentations running in parallel) was about digital transformation, but mainly presented ideas on how to market and sell more goods to consumers through digital sales channels. The current owner of the Sports Tracker app is Amer group, the owner of many great brands like Atomic, Patagonia, Salomon, Suunto, Wilson, etc. It’s understood that within the group there’s a lot of know-how on how to market and sell goods.

I’m writing this on my way home from the MyData2016 conference. In the conference, there were numerous presentations on how the society is changing, and many on how consumerism is changing, too. People of today don’t want to be sold to. They want to get personalised experiences matching their values, and they want to be involved in creating value on initiatives and activities that matter to them. I see this as a really welcome development, and really want to believe in it.

Almost all other sports and wellness apps have already understood and are embracing the API ecosystems. When you expose access to data through publicly available interfaces, you no longer need to worry about offering that personalized experience to each and every different user or user group. The data produced by a sports app may be a key ingredient in something more meaningful, like in an athlete learning to train better or a person with chronic illness being able to manage his condition better. But the sports app cannot produce all the value alone. Especially not to both the athlete, and the chronically ill, and the myriads of other people with different needs, life styles and preferences. On the other hand, the value of the data from that app increases exponentially, when combined with data from a nutrition diary, smart scale, and perhaps medical devices.

Today, building an API should not be a big task. The first step for a wellness app would be to integrate with HealthKIT and Google FIT. In case that’s inconvenient for some reason, the app most likely uses and API already, to communicate with a cloud server. Opening that API for third parties requires little more than an OAuth2 implementation, for which there are plenty of implementations available. Of course, there’s the added cost of documentation and support. To get around that, an alternative is to open the API to aggregators, such as Human API, Validic, W2E, or Wellmo. You can even get the aggregator really interested by making an exclusive offer. It would be more limiting to developers wanting to use the data, but at least there would be a way.

Among Sensotrend’s current users, and among the potential users we have interviewed, Sports Tracker seems to be a really popular application. This may be due to it’s long history, and due to Nokia being so dominant in the Finnish handset market at one point in time, and Sports Tracker being the most highly acclaimed sports app at that time, on that platform. We’ve gotten many requests to support Sports Tracker in our app. This far, we have asked those users to be patient, and wait until the API gets released or the app gets integrated to HealthKit and Google FIT.

From today on, we’re changing that message. It’s evident that an API is not coming in any foreseeable future. People who are interested in seeing their data in our service, or in any other service for that matter, should instead select Endomondo, Strava, Runkeeper, Moves, or almost any other app that gets the value of open APIs.

I’m a long time user of Sports Tracker myself, and changing to another app requires some effort. Just selecting the right one from the ones listed above needs some research. However, the longer I keep using Sports Tracker, the more I feel I’m being left out of opportunities to learn, and to use the data in meaningful ways. And the bigger the effort to transfer the data manually to another platform, if I ever choose to.

It’s supposed to be my data. I should be able to use it in the ways I want to.