Why Are Fitness Apps Still so Hard to Work With?
Fitness apps are supposed to make training easier. Smarter. More seamless. But sometimes, it feels like they’re just one crash away from sending you back to pen and paper.
Take last week. I had a training run planned through my Garmin’s coaching system. I was ready, laced up, warmed up—and then the watch crashed. Not once. Every time. The plan wouldn’t load, and there was no fallback. So I ran anyway and logged it outside of the coaching plan, thinking: no big deal.
Turns out, it was a big deal.
Because the training plan uses internal IDs to track each workout, my independent run was invisible to it. There was no way to manually mark the run as completed in the system, no way to tell the plan “Hey, I did it!” unless the run had the magic metadata baked in from the beginning. I even tried hacking the .fit file—yes, actually opening it with vi and trying to copy-paste the right string. Total black box. Nothing worked.
And this wasn’t some obscure app. This was from one of the biggest fitness platforms on the planet.
It’s wild that in 2025, connecting the dots between I did the thing and the app knows I did the thing still requires a perfect handshake of proprietary formats, cloud syncs, and opaque IDs. These apps track VO₂ max, lactate thresholds, and heat adaptation… but give them a simple edge case like “I ran, but not your way,” and they throw up their hands.
For all the tech in fitness, there’s still a shocking lack of interoperability, transparency, and plain old graceful fallback.
Sometimes the hardest workout isn’t the run itself—it’s getting credit for it.