Activity-tracking smartphone app Moves today is launching its API, which will allow other app builders to integrate Moves data into their own offerings. The app does away with wearables and uses just software and your existing iPhone to track activity, telling you how much you’ve walked, cycled, run or driven during the course of any given day. The product of Finnish startup ProtoGeo Oy, the app hopes to capture the attention of a broader market segment than the somewhat niche crowd that currently goes in for wearable fitness trackers like the Jawbone UP and Nike+ FuelBand.
Moves promised an API would arrive in the coming months, and with its arrival developers can extract information gathered by the app including bike, run and drive data, as well as places visited and entire routes tracked. These can then be used to either supplement data gathered by other apps (you could easily see a partnership working between Moves and something like Withings’ home health monitoring app, for example), for making games to incentivize activity and more.
More and more, quantified-self and personal health-monitoring tools are reaching out to partners via APIs and SDKs, mostly in an effort to expand their appeal to a broader cross-section of users. When I recently spoke to RunKeeper CEO Jason Jacobs, he said that his company (another software-based activity tracker) is extremely interested in what it can accomplish with partners like Pebble, and plans to identify other similar opportunities. Moves looks to be inviting the same kind of synergy by throwing the gates wide open, with an API designed for use with mobile, web and desktop applications.
To get started with the Moves API, devs need to register the app using their Google accounts. The startup has provided an API demo that shows how simply API data can be used to create a basic mobile web app that displays Moves data in a unique visual style. But the real possibilities lie in much more creative integrations of Moves data; it is likely that this space can do more still once partnerships evolve and apps start to cluster around a core set of devices and services.