Moves

» see moves-app.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The people who counted their steps every day had their favorite gadgets and their wrist straps. I was not one of those people. Moves was the app that promised you did not need any of it, just the phone already in your pocket, and it would quietly work out whether you had been walking or cycling and for how long.

ProtoGeo Oy, a small studio in Helsinki, shipped it for iPhone in January 2013 and for Android later that year. It ran in the background off the phone's own motion sensors and drew your day as a colored timeline, never asking you to open it and log anything. For a category that mostly meant buying hardware, an app that asked for nothing extra was a real idea.

Facebook bought ProtoGeo in April 2014 and kept Moves running as a standalone app, separate from the main account. Then it sat. On 2 July 2018 Facebook announced it would shut Moves down at the end of that month, alongside the teen app tbh and the friend-mapping app Hello, all cited as low usage. The lights went off on 31 July 2018 and the collected activity data was set to be deleted within ninety days.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually did ~

The trick was passive tracking. Most fitness apps of that era wanted you to press start before a run and stop after. Moves inferred all of it from the accelerometer, so a person who never thought of themselves as tracking anything ended the day with a full map of where they had walked. That was also its weakness, since always-on sensing drained batteries, and battery was the thing people noticed.

~ the acquisition ~

When Facebook picked it up, the promise on paper was reach and resources for a nine-person team. What happened in practice was the fate of a lot of acqui-hired apps. The talent went inside a much larger company, and the product kept its name for a while out of goodwill even as the roadmap stopped moving. Users noticed the quiet before they noticed the shutdown notice.

~ how it ended ~

Facebook framed the July 2018 closures as tidying up apps almost nobody opened, which was fair. Moves had been coasting for four years. Still, there is a specific sadness to a health app dying, because the whole pitch was that your history was worth keeping, and then the history got a ninety-day countdown. I never trusted my own steps to it. The people who did got a reminder that the log only lives as long as the company wants to host it.

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