The best health and fitness apps to reach your New Year's resolutions

Jeff Weisbein -

Congratulations to all, the dumpster fire that was 2016 is no more and we have moved on to the new glorious year of 2017. And as with any new year, tens of thousands all around the world will decide that this year they must do better about getting healthy and losing weight. In our modern world, one of the most popular ways to do that is with the help of apps. So, without going too deep into how long these New Year’s resolutions last, though we are just in time for the new gym membership frenzy, a brand new report was just released that can help answer the question: what are the best and worst fitness and health apps.

Applause, a top provider of digital experience testing, compiled a research report studying the different available health and fitness tracking apps, finding which of them are best rated across Google Play and the Apple App store. In the report, 12 apps received “Elite” status, meaning their average rating was 85 or more.

Two apps received a near perfect score of 94, making them the best fitness and health ranked apps across the app stores. Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly I guess, depending on who you ask, both are period tracker apps. In fact, in the top 12 list, five, which is almost half, are period trackers. I don’t know if there’s a conclusion to be made there, but being a man, I don’t really feel comfortable making it. Other than the period apps, the best rated fitness related app, which can help you with those new year resolutions is 30 Day Fit Challenge which is at 6th place.

Perhaps even more interesting, are the bottom 13 apps. The most intriguing thing about the worst of the worst list, is that most of these apps are made by top companies. Either apps to control major fitness trackers like Fitbit, Jawbone and Garmin, or electronics companies trying to make their mark on the fitness world like Sony, Google, and Xiaomi, all fall below the average score for a health and fitness app. Even sports giants like Nike and Under Armour can’t seem to catch a break. Now, it’s important to remember these rankings are informed by customer ratings, so this could mean that users hold these major companies to a higher standard.

Applause aims to empower companies of all sizes to deliver solid digital experiences across web, mobile, and IoT as well as brick-and-mortar. Applause provides in-the-wild testing, user feedback and research solutions through its DX platform. This provides brands with real-world insights, helping them to serve multiple demographics, locations, devices and operating systems.

In case you were wondering, here are the top five apps with their respective scores according to the report:

  • Period Tracker, My Calendar by Leap Fitness Group (94.8)
  • Life – Period Tracker by Lovetap LLC (94.0)
  • Relax Melodies by Ipnos Soft (90.2)
  • Period Tracker Lite by GP International (89.1)
  • StrongLifts 5×5 (88.0)

And here are the five worst apps, again, with their scores:

  • Weight Watchers (39.4)
  • Nike+ Run Club (38.9)
  • Google Fit (38.0)
  • Garmin Connect Mobile (36.9)
  • Mi Fit by Xiaomi (29.1)

So if you plan on keeping that new healthy lifestyle for longer than the first two weeks of 2017, these are the apps to use, and maybe even more importantly, the apps to avoid.