It has been almost a month since iOS 14 was announced to the world, this week I am looking at a more in-depth review of the changes to the activity app in the new version of iOS.
The Activity app gets a major redesign in iOS 14, in fact it even gets a whole new name. It is now called “Fitness”. When you open the app, you are no longer greeted with your Today section you had before. Now you are greeted with the Summary page which has loads of information on it.
Your notice that there is now only two tabs at the bottom instead of the previous four. This is because it has been designed to be simpler. However, I think this has made the first tab “Summary” very cluttered. Now when you open the app you are greeted with your rings for today, your three most recent workouts, your current trends and three awards.
There is simply too much to look at now on one screen and I can only imagine that if you were to have a smaller screen then my iPhone X or have your text larger then you could be scrolling for ages to get the information that was previously so much easier to look at.
The cluttered feel of the app now actually bugged me that much that I let them know in the feedback app. Hopefully they will at least make one more tab for trends again before iOS 14’s release in September.
When viewing workouts their doesn’t seem to be any change there and the only change I noticed on the fitness app was that they had changed the name from “Active calories” to a more generic name of “Kilocalories”.
Looking at the watch version of the Activity app wasn’t really any differences, in fact the only one I could spot was that you can no longer force touch to change your move goal you have to scroll to the bottom of the page and push a button from there, quite annoying to be honest as its extra steps now to do a simple thing. As for changing your units of measure during workouts now you have to open settings on your watch, go to workouts, scroll all the way to the bottom and select Units of measure.
Workouts now has four new options these are Dance, Core-Training, Functional strength training and Dance. There is also a new cooldown mode for after your workouts. Things like Dance for example did exist as a workout before on the apple watch however they were recorded the same as slow indoor walk. Now these workouts are so much more accurate.
To summarise my thoughts, it’s great to see that Apple are still looking to further improve their Workouts app and the new fitness app. However, I am disappointed with the new layout it’s got a similar makeover to it like the health app did last year with iOS 13. I’m also disappointed that Trends doesn’t get more involvement. I was really hoping we would at least get some motivation notifications on the watch about our trends or even a trends app for the watch.
I’m also going to struggle not writing Activity and calling it fitness too. Thanks for reading and if you have questions or feedback please tweet me here: www.twitter.com/kylewilkinson46
Kyle Wilkinson
WWDC 2020, Read more*1
WWDC 2020 - A Summary
iOS 14, First Looks.
WatchOS 7, First Looks.
[1] All links are shortened using "Short URL" which you can access their main site here https://www.shorturl.at
[2] Screenshots are taken on an iPhone X running iOS 14 Developer Beta 2, Some features may change on the public release of iOS 14.
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