Endomondo

» see endomondo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

endomondo launched in 2007 out of copenhagen as a gps run-tracker for the era when phones were starting to be the thing you carried instead of a dedicated garmin. it grew a particularly strong user base across europe and scandinavia, where running culture was high and the local language support mattered. by 2015 it had around twenty million registered users and a place on a lot of nordic phones as the default fitness companion.

under armour bought it in february 2015 for 85 million dollars as part of a connected-fitness buying spree that also included mapmyrun for 150 million and myfitnesspal for 475 million. the strategy was supposed to make under armour a software company as much as a sportswear one. for a while it ran the three apps in parallel, with endomondo as the european-leaning entry and mapmyrun as the american-leaning sibling. customer overlap was high. nobody at under armour was sure why both needed to exist.

endomondo's peak years overlap with my running-app years almost exactly, but i was on the wrong continent. the apps that turkish runners and cyclists ended up on were strava first and runtastic second. endomondo was the name you saw in european app store charts and on the friend graphs of scandinavian colleagues. by the time it had real turkish localization it was already inside under armour, which had decided not to care.

~ the case file ~

~ how it actually ended ~

on october 29, 2020, under armour announced two decisions at once: it was selling myfitnesspal to private equity firm francisco partners for 345 million dollars, and it was shutting down endomondo on december 31. the loss on myfitnesspal was real, given the 475 million purchase price five years earlier. endomondo had no buyer at all. the company gave users until february 15, 2021 to download an archive of their historic workouts.

~ the funny part ~

only workout history could be migrated to mapmyrun. training plans did not come across. profile information, the social graph of friends and clubs, the community challenges, the personal bests, all of it stayed in the archive. people who had thirteen years of running on the platform got back a zip file. mapmyrun got back a wave of users who did not really want to be there.

~ what got buried with it ~

endomondo had quietly been a benchmark for what a non-american fitness app could look like. its closure left a hole in european-localized gps tracking that strava mostly filled and a smaller pile of nordic apps tried to. the endomondo domain came back online in 2024 as a generic fitness content site with no relation to the original company, which is what happens to a brand when the platform is dead but the url still has search equity.

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