I Wish I Could Quit You, Apple Watch Activity App
Writers frequently mine ill-starred love affairs for fiction or memoirs. If I had to write about the most emotionally complicated relationship I've had, I'd have to write about the Activity app on the Apple Watch.
It's had its highs -- I've racked up multiple awards for unbroken streaks, I've broken several workout records, I've aced monthly challenges -- and then it's had lows where I've looked at bonkers daily prompts and wondered, "Do the people who design and maintain this app know anything about human nature?"
For those of you who have sidestepped the madness: The Activity app has three metrics you must meet every day. You have to stand up for at least a minute for twelve hours; you have to meet your preset "active calories burned" goal for the day; you have to clock 30 minutes of "exercise." I put the last one in quotes there because the watch's definition of what it counts as exercise is inscrutable. I've washed my hair in the shower and logged seven minutes of "exercise," scrambled up hills with a 1200-foot elevation change while hiking and apparently only exerted myself for 180 seconds of the ascent. I wouldn't mind the imprecision except the Activity app's generation of a user's presumed health and fitness trends is based on bad data.
The app is also doing this bad data analysis with no acknowledgment that there's a universe beyond the narrow band around one's wrist. Activity is very alarmed, for example, that the total number of miles I walk per day has dropped by 33% over the course of the past nine months. Why, things were so much more lively in February! What could have possibly changed about my daily routines starting in March?
Activity is geared toward displaying results that are based on data that exists in a void at best, with gamified rewards built in if the user generates data that trends in the "correct" direction.
In a wonderfully insightful review of the Amazon Halo Band, Geoffrey Fowler and Heather Kelly write, "Our Fitbits and Apple Watches don’t really know how to turn mountains of body data into actionable insight and behavior changes."
I agree with this. I'd go even further and say the problem with the mountains of data is that it's not even accurate or useful data.
Another thing that speaks poorly of Activity's design and user experience team is how the app is constructed in such a way as to presume humans never experience any changes in their physical conditions. Imagine the psychological adjustments one must make if one becomes pregnant and still has the Activity app -- which does not log pregnancies -- nattering away at crushing their Move ring. Heaven help the person who's got the first-trimester exhaustion and hyperemesis and goes from crushing their Move ring to barely able to get off the couch. Let's not even talk about how infuriating those "Get up and move around! Close that stand ring!" alerts would be if one were pinned under an infant during a cluster-feeding stage.
(The Activity app being wholly unable to deal with the exigencies of human reproduction is unsurprising, what with it coming from the same company that did not think to include menstrual tracking in the first edition of its Health app.)
The Activity app embodies the worst aspects of around the black art of quantifying human activity -- the idea that people are always iterating toward improved personal metrics, getting up every day to rise and grind (despite the fact that rest is a vital component of health).
If Apple really wants to empower customers to "own their health in a way that they were not able to do before," as Tim Cook said, the first step would be to recognize that the Activity app is fundamentally broken: It treats the user as a stack of tasks to be managed instead of giving people the power to approach their health-related tasks in ways that are actionable and contextually reflective of a wider world.
The late Julia Reed once sketched the outlines of a doomed romance with this passage:
“There is just us,” he said one night over and over again. In any relationship, there is never, of course, “just us,” but I was reminded of lines from Robert Penn Warren then too: the passage in A Place to Come To in which he describes the “second stage” of a love affair, when time ceases to move laterally and context is all but gone, and, above all, there is total contempt for the rest of the world.
It's not hard to see the Activity app in lieu of that long-gone swain's absurd sweet nothings: There is just the data, no context and total contempt for the rest of the world.
Will I be giving up the app or the watch? Of course not. Even as I type the excuses -- I've gotten back into training for open-water swims and I like seeing how my 100-meter split times change in response to training changes -- I realize how deluded and besotted I sound as I sigh over the workouts I log. But if I didn't, would there be any story in this tortured relationship at all?
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