Stride: Fun Fitness Motivation

Captured 45 hexes with 15km walk. After “activity pending” application simply lost my activity and achievement. A walk of 1 hex has been saved however. Make it more stable before public and paid subscription.

This app has totally changed my behavior with running. Before the app I would do the same runs all the time and get bored with the monotony. But now, Stride has led me to explore totally new routes to both fill in my personal exploration map and also to snag hexes in competition with other runners. The Stride map becomes a fun tool to strategize new places to run to take over the leaderboard in your town or fill in the gaps in your hexes. Wish list: satellite view for the map and a few other map tweaks, but overall it has all the pieces in place to make running around you feel fresh.

It’s a fun idea but severely lacking in the gameplay aspects. I am car free and walk around my neighborhood (6+ blocks in all directions) multiple times a day, but never can get ownership because of how they calculate area. Basically, long distance runners do a 20 mile loop three tomes a week and get credit for EVERY space inside that loop. They have never been on my street, much less so often they should get game credit for most visits. I suggested a few ways to weigh the credits to makenit more engaging for non-marathoners but I never got so much as an acknowledgment from the developers. Deleted.

This is my second year using Stride. When it first came out I was a fan of the concept. Today, I’m not a fan anymore. I just ran an 9 min mile in a new location I haven’t been to and once I was done, I went to a park, not too far away and did a 4 mile hike, not even touching or anywhere near my precious territory. After about 75 minutes later, completing my hike and submitting my activity, the app gives me a message, telling me that it’s not accepting my activity because it’s a “duplicate activity”—please! How can this be anywhere remotely duplicate to the short run I did earlier? So I did all that hike for NOTHING. If this sort of thing doesn’t get resolved, I will certainly not be using this app again. NOT A FAN! 👎

This is a great app that keeps you motivated to run by turning it into a game. I especially love how it almost forces you to explore new places. However, there is room for improvement. One feature I would love to have is auto pause or at least a start count down. Another feature that I think would improve the dynamic of the game is to add “hex decay”where a captured hex will decay over time if not visited. I think this feature will make the game a little more competitive as runners will have to revisit their captured hexes from time to time in order to keep them.

When I first downloaded the app it was a fun app to compete with local people but now it’s just over run by 1 person who takes all the fun out it.

Love the concept but after 6 months I am giving up. Constantly crashes or doesn’t work correctly. Did the free trial because I thought it would be worth a subsection but there is no way I’d pay for this, I’m not even going to use the free version anymore.

After deciding I no longer want to use the Stride app, I learned there is apparently no straightforward way to delete my profile and associated data. This means my past location data could remain visible to other users indefinitely. The app privacy policy states that you should email the developer to request data erasure, but I’ve done so four times without being acknowledged.

Love the app - pushes me to run and walk more but have consistent issues with the Apple Watch capabilities… mis-tracks and voids activity claiming I cheated with no way to dispute and doesn’t always sync activity tracked on watch to your profile (spinning wheel and never lets you ‘end workout’) Many missed hexes… I want my hexes!! Ha

Hopefully the development team will do some advertising so we have some more competition!