Under Armour dumped an app | Hacker News Reader

Under Armour dumped an app

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68 pointsmjohn52 comments

Under Armour still owns a lot of digital assets (1). I think this set back will help UA prepare for future successes.

Bold Prediction: I think by 2035 neither Nike, Adidas, or Under Armour will be the dominant shoe brand. I believe we will have a new company which will change the game dynamically. A new Apple or Tesla of shoes.

(1) https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/under-a...

More likely that Nike becomes the AB InBev of shoes and just acquires little brands that have any chance of growing big enough to be a threat

Depending on which market you look at its already the case. Good running shoes are not vought from any of these brands, soccer shoes is mainly adidas/nike and just for fashion there could be a new company every day. Its just branding.

I don't think this statement is true:

> Good running shoes are not vought from any of these brands

The Nike Vaporfly has made numerous headlines[0] for "technology doping" because runners are using it to win marathons. From the recent NYC marathon, Nike and Adidas dominated in comparison to other shoe brands[1]:

> Of the total 36 podium finishers, 25 were wearing Nike shoes

> Of the 12 winners, 8 were wearing Nike shoes

> Adidas comes second with 6 podium finishers and 2 winners

> Other brands are Brooks (2 podiums), Asics, Saucony and New Balance (1 podium each)

0: https://www.npr.org/2020/01/31/801580146/amid-nike-controver...

1: https://www.runningshoesguru.com/2018/11/shoes-of-the-winner...

Shoes of the winning marathoners tells you what brand is sponsoring the runners. The sponsorship has a tremendous impact on who wins major races. The shoes don't have that much of an impact.

Wrong. Nikes have been a straight up sensation the past couple of years, and in particular the past 6 months.

Go to any race. The field is STACKED with people running vaporflys. I see it at our running club. People are suddenly paying their own money to buy the same Nike shoe, when in the past people used kind of whatever they preferred.

Tune in to the olympic marathon trials February 29. I bet the vast majority of the field will be wearing the exact same shoe.

And not just because they're being paid to. They're setting records. Records are falling unusually fast, and by substantial margins.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-athletics-shoe-factbox/fa...

That's just dead wrong. Multiple independent researchers have verified that the latest Nike running shoes are more efficient than any competitors. In these distance running events even a tiny improvement can be the difference between 1st place and 11th. The lion's share of prize money and recognition goes to the top 3; everyone else barely gets mentioned.

Clearly you haven’t run any marathons recently. Most serious runners with money to spend are now using nike by my observation

Read your parent commenter's linked articles. Your statement is demonstrably false.

not a crazy prediction. My prediction: Amazon. I have a few pairs of their branded shoes. Simple, cheap, effective. People will eventually realize the newest neat-o feature in the latest shoes are not that big a deal.

> People will eventually realize the newest neat-o feature in the latest shoes are not that big a deal.

Absolutely. Any day now, humans will lose their taste for novelty and fashion.

Invest in burlap!

People do this all the time. It's called your forties and it's when marketers stop caring about you.

So everyone will become a dad? Lol

If we see a new shoe company, it will be an athlete-run business that comes from someone like Lebron or Curry starting their own brand. But Nike / UA would never let that happen which is why they pay them millions of dollars in endorsements. And if it did happen, Nike would acquire the new company in short order.

This seems to me to be the exact opposite of how the shoe business works now.

Shoes are a Zahavian signal. It doesn't matter how comfortable or convenient the shoes are. Its primary purpose beyond protection of your feet is to prove you are with it. Same applies to iPhones and designer clothes.

I think you underestimate the power of endorsements.

What a disingenuous title, they're killing some small app, not MFP which is the one people commonly use

Ok, we've downgraded 'its' to 'an' in the title above.

But, it's an app that's connected to hardware that was sold, and that /is/ news, because the hardware is now much less useful than it was when it was marketed and sold.

"MFP" is "My Fitness Pal" for those of you like me who haven't had enough coffee yet

Agreed, although the idea of MyFitnessPal being killed for a moment activated my long-held desire to build an alternative. MFP is bloated, locked down (without a premium subscription) and the UX lacks thoughtfulness in many painful ways (two examples: navigating between diary dates and viewing macronutrients per meal).

I know there are at least 2 popular alternatives. My only real complaint of MFP is it takes like a full minute to start up. Don't know if its because I run adblock on my phone, and they have a long timeout to some metrics endpoint. But its a minor annoyance.

I feel like $45/yr is basically nothing for an app I use constantly every day. Do those minutes not add up for you?

Nah, I'm usually doing something else while I log. So I just pay attention to that for a minute. They already data mine my input I'm sure, as well as there are ads. I can find something better to spend $3 on per month.

I found it a significant enough annoyance to switch to a competitor. Getting into food logging requires low friction.

There are lots of good alternatives. I've been bootstrapping my alternative tracker since 2011. Started as a hobby project back then but now at $2M ARR and growing.

Yeah, I was worried there for a moment, because MFP is a pretty great app for tracking what you eat, among other things.

Same here, I was about to spend all weekend scrapping their data to rebuild it if they were just going to shut it off. It’s definitely the top calorie tracker out there right now

Yup, using MFP is one of the best changes I've ever made in my life.

(not to say I couldn't do the same with another product, but it happens to be the one i use)

Maybe this is a sign of what's to come (hopefully not)

It's just really tough to compete in the fitness tech market. The total addressable market size isn't huge. And over the last few years Garmin has thrown tremendous resources into it and launched so many new products that smaller competitors were squeezed out. Wahoo, Suunto, Coros, and Polar are still hanging on with small market shares in devices and Strava may survive as an independent app. Nike tried and gave up. Fitbit was slowly dying and got rescued by a Google acquisition. But anyone else is going to have to come up with a real disruptive innovation to have a chance of long term survival.

It is tough. One of the nice things about the Garmin universe is that they have a foundation of open standards that help with interoperability and forward continuity if parts of that universe close. The FIT file format is open. The ANT+ protocol is open I believe, but devices can also use BLE which is open. If I preserve all of my FIT files, and Strava decided to close down, I could upload them all to Training Peaks or an alternative site. I've already written my own analysis software which didn't require permission from any website for access to my data. My Garmin device gives me access to the FIT files without requiring a cloud service.

The ANT+ protocol and FIT file format are sort of open. They are well documented and available to everyone. Multiple independent companies do contribute. But ultimately they are controlled by Garmin; they aren't true open standards like WiFi, TCP/IP, or HTML.

https://www.thisisant.com/

Agreed. When I have tried to work with it [1], the format has been anything but open. It's been a mixture of other people's libraries and reverse-engineering to make Garmin files work for my needs.

There is an SDK with a license agreement that is probably more descriptive, but the license terms are not what one expects from measurement instrumentation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15825838

Not to mention how much of that market is being bled off by Apple. Obviously, specialty tools are always going to have a market. But companies like Apple are going to capture more and more of the “mainstream” market with their own fitness offerings.

It's not entirely accurate to say that Nike gave up on apps. They still maintain a core shopping app, Strava competitor and one or two other niches: https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/nike-inc/id301521406#see...

Nike gave up on wearable devices. They used to sell their own fitness trackers and sensors.

Sneakerhead here. This is tangental but related. The core of Under Armor's problem is design. The market is simply not excited by UA's offerings. This cascades throughout their ecosystem - this app included.

UA sells shoes, no question. Just not to sneakerheads.

Think of it this way, I remember as web engineer, when engineers were installing Chrome on family members computers to get them off the built-in browser. Chrome was far better (at the time) and the core audience - engineers - helped Chrome ascend to the status as most widely used browser (https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share).

Nike, Adidas, and recently New Balance have just consistently produced more exiting designs beyond the initial hype machine.

A simple look at the StockX resale market reflects that.

I'm not surprised this app failed. UA is a big brand and, no doubt this will not kill them. But they aren't an 'exiting' brand. Focus on the core product - that marketing that the core product design provides effects all their efforts - this app included.

I hope you'll forgive my ignorance, but what do you (as a "sneakerhead") look for in shoe design? Is this a matter of visual aethetics, or of performance/support metrics? I buy shoes relatively rarely, and usually end up getting something similar to what I had before, so I feel like I have no idea what "good design" even means in a shoe, any more than I would consider design of a screwdriver.

Obviously, such good design exists -- I like one cordless drill better than the other, for example -- but often time good design is not immediately obvious. What are the hallmarks of good shoe design that you look for? What excites you about one shoe vs another, and that prompts you to buy specific shoes rather than whatever happens to fit at $store?

A very broad answer to your query... sneakerheads run the gamut in terms of what they might look for or why they might want a shoe. A sneakerhead may want to have a shoe in their collection but never rock (wear) them, another shoe might be a grail that is worn infrequently or for special occasions, and yet another shoe might become a "beater" - a shoe you love to wear and wear it til it's in tatters.

In my collection I have all three types. Some sneakerheads are into collecting only the most valuable shoes in terms of reselling (this is not me).

Even for my utilitarian shoes/boots I obsess over details such as construction, comfort, and craft/style. It's why I'm a fan of some limited Redwing & Nick's Handmade boots and not something you can just pick up at your local big box store.

What I consider a great shoe design, another sneakerhead might think is trash. Some sneakerheads only collect specific types/brands. For me it's usually a combination of style/design, quality of materials, and comfort. If a shoe isn't comfortable I won't wear it and if it's valuable in the aftermarket I'll probably sell it for profit at some point - unless it's a pure work of art in which case I'll keep it indefinitely. Yes there are shoes like that (for me).

But there are trends - shoes that a great many people find "exciting" or good design for various reasons. As I mentioned in my original comment, there are reselling marketplaces such as StockX (stockx.com) that track trends and display the value sneakers - the value can be dictated by a combination of factors such as design/style, materials and rarity with a peppering of comfort & utility.

I totally get that some people just want a shoe to be a shoe and don't care much about style/design. I just happen not to be one of those people.

It's not necessarily one or the other but definitely skews towards the aesthetics/fashion element. That said, the best designed sneakers often rank highly on both of those dimensions. Another poster mentioned Nike's rise in running shoes. They're highly functional, often the best in the game, but also designed with enough attention to aesthetics to be seen on the foot of many executives in their day to day lives. That's good design.

To the gp's point, the single pair of UA sneakers I own are highly functional and sport-specific that only come out at the gym...but picking them out of a crowd of UA's lineup is difficult.

To sneakerheads, fashion and aesthestics value far more than function and performance. Sneakerheads being a [large] subset of the current streetwear trend, exclusivity is another major factor for inflated prices in streetwear and sneakers.

Timed and location specific drops of exclusive, limited edition, special colorway variants of shoes, clothes and all other types of popular gear raises value. As mentioned, StockX majorly drives the market, and the exclusivity leads the savvy (or obsessed) consumer to seek advantages over others: bots, bulk buying, captcha solving, DDoSing, proxies, and the usual exploits are employed. The prices and value may be ridiculous but obviously, it's worth it to someone and there's lots of money to be made.

> To the gp's point, the single pair of UA sneakers I own are highly functional and sport-specific that only come out at the gym...but picking them out of a crowd of UA's lineup is difficult.

A very good summary. UA just doesn't have whatever it is that influencers, fashionistas, artists, and designers are looking for - which is mostly style/design/hype attached to good materials, exclusivity and comfort.

It's how great design translates into good brand marketing (read: hype) - UA isn't it.

I really don't understand why they can't just stop selling the hardware but continue supporting the app and introduce a way to move data from it to one of their other products. They're a big enough company they can shoulder the cost of this. In fact - it should be considered an investment in not losing future business. Failing to do it just shows disdain for their customers.

I'll never understand why they won't invest even a small amount to provide basic data export (make it a CSV!) of whatever customer data they have.

Most people won't use it, but for those who want it, they can have it..

Someone should start a "service shutdown customer data export as service" business.. :-)

https://archive.md/xO3xd

For curious, this is the actual news from the title:

The company quietly pulled its UA Record app from both Google Play and Apple's App Store on New Year's Eve. In an announcement dated sometime around January 8, Under Armour said that not only has the app been removed from all app stores, but the company is no longer providing customer support or bug fixes for the software, which will completely stop working as of March 31.

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/smart...

Better to quit the experiment early before the damage becomes big enough to hurt the brands image.

Tech startups change a lot, when you use something one and off over a long period of time, I find it difficult to navigate within their ecosystems.

As for sports tracking, there are a few reasons I can see to use them: Social, Health, Visualization, & Data collection/management

Maybe a little off topic for some, but here is my experience with sports tracking after using a couple of different solutions during the past 10 years:

I like Endomondo, and joined fairly short after they launched the website.

They have had a pro version, a plus version, and now a premium version. Just when the app launched, I bought the paid version from the app store, which was a single payment and I liked to support a new, and in my case local, initiative.

One thing which was really nice with particularly this app, was the audio feedback, while running, so no need to look at a screen to get the lap time, pace, heart rate, etc.

I don't use the social features a lot, but it seems that Strava[0] now dominates in this space, I have tried their app, but I don't like their data vis, and find their privacy/sharing permissions to distracting to modify to suit my preference.

I have since moved to using a running watch from Garmin and don't really rely on the tracking capability of a smartphone.

Now I have copied my running activities to runalyze[1] a project which used to have all their code base on github in their earlier days. They do a fantastic job at visualizing data from both my watch and surprisingly also very well from 3rd party footpod powermeters[2], they do this much better than Garmin does on their own website[3] because they overlay right and left shoe on the same graph. They do on the other hand, not have 'social' features, but you can generate a public sharable URL.

Luckily, Garmin is a pretty big company, and the will hopefully not close their service any time soon, but it bothers me a little that on my newer watch, 920XT, I need data connection to extract my activities from my watch directly directly to their platform in order to view it.

On my old 910XT, it was possible to extract activities to my laptop, or even to my phone with a 3rd party app[4] and an ANT+ chip. There was even a nice app for viewing activities locally on the device [5] - a really nice solution if you don't have a data connection, and you are using an older watch with an android phone.

Over all, I have been very happy with Garmin, just with the tiny exceptions of need for online sync, and the decision to remove support for their temperature sensor data field.

-cheers

[0] https://www.strava.com/

[1] https://runalyze.com/

[2] https://runscribe.com/

[3] https://connect.garmin.com/

[4] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quantrity....

[5] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sk.flashdev.gc...

You can plug Garmin devices into a USB port and copy the FIT files directly to your computer.

what an obvious solution! Thanks

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