Share your experience with the Suunto app here!
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@Antonio-Crapsi Hi! Did you have the partner services Runalyze etc connected before the activity was done?
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@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos yes. When i use the watch everything was pushed automagically. I thought that maybe the app works differently.
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@Antonio-Crapsi I just tried with mine and it works. Android and version 3.64.507
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@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos same os and app version. But i did not upgrade the firmware of my spartan trainer whr.
I also just tried two fake activities ( run and hike) and they both got synced everywhere. So only my real one stayed only in app. Maybe cause i did not have wifi this afternoon? -
@Antonio-Crapsi hmm. Could you try now a fake one? With the app…
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@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos yes i tried 2 and they both worked. No clue about this afternoon hike
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@Antonio-Crapsi lets keep an eye on this. Feel free to open a thread as a bug in our issues section if it happens. In the meanwhile I can provide a fit file for you for that activity if you like, that you will need to manually upload though.
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@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos sure that’s great. How can i point you to the right activity?
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@Antonio-Crapsi share a link via the app and send it to a message to me here in the forum.
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I find the Suunto app to be absolutely terrible, and in my opinion it should see a complete redesign. As far as types of users for these devices go, I’m of the most basic type. I just want to keep track and compare how many kilometers of for example cycling I’ve done between certain periods and compare some basic stats like average heart rate. I also like to use the route and POI features occasionally. These are not currently available in any useful form in the app, except for the bare bones route design -feature. The user interface is also one of the worst I have seen: it manages to be confusing and difficult to use, while at the same time offering next to no features.
What is the purpose of the app? Firstly, for exercise tracking, it only provides very general information, such as a weekly summary of one’s general activity. A 20 euro activity bracelet will do that. Secondly, it’s flooded with social media features that I can’t imagine anyone actually caring about. Why would I ever need to know what route some random person took on his morning jog and what his heart rate was, and why is this prioritized over almost all other features in the UI? All the while the important things (for me), like the calendar view, ability to compare things between given periods of time, performance graphs, UI that doesn’t give me a headache, proper route planning, POIs etc. are absent.
And this is just me: an out of shape guy who’s physical activity mostly consists of cycling to work. I can’t imagine the app serving any purpose whatsoever to the users who the watch was actually designed for. A lack of web interface is a massive detriment too, as a small touch screen is not a useful input method for any serious purpose. The app also appears to be running on the background, draining my battery, without an option to configure it in the settings - I will likely be uninstalling it until it is fixed. I don’t need to use the app throughout day and night. I only need it for few minutes to sync the exercises of the day and maybe some routes occasionally.
I’m sorry for coming through as overly negative, but I’m extremely disappointed in the current state of the app. The best option at this stage, in my opinion, would be to abandon the app entirely and go back to Movescount, as it at least provides the basic functions without having to pay for a third party application. To me it looks like the app development is being lead by accountants: with smart watches eating the market share of dedicated sport watches, they are attempting to cut costs by driving down Movescount, while copy-pasting Sports tracker code and branding it as the new Suunto app. I’m not an accountant, but I can see how that is going to end up working.
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I’ve been a long time Suunto Vector user and moved to a Traverse Alpha. I use my watch more for back country navigation so I’m not really interested in social stuff or work out metrics. From that POV, I find the app to be pretty lacking. First let’s start with what I liked:
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Connection to the watch worked well. I only connect to sync my data and then I turn off blue tooth, so can’t speak to notifications. Connection is fast and stable every time though.
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I like the clean, simple navigation
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I like the mapbox maps. Seems a lot of services are standardizing on these, so it’s a good familiar feel.
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Diary seems like a nice clean way to get to my past activities.
What is missing:
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No way to change settings or screens on the watch. Seems like it should be V1 functionality?
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No syncing of my POIs. That’s a bummer. Can’t even get to them on the web app as far as I can tell. Even more, I’d like to be able to create POIs in the app/web interface and sync them to the watch.
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Route planning in the app seemed to be missing the ability to add way points? I must be missing something right?
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No ability to export an activity from the app.
Myself and most of the people I know have always chosen Suunto devices because they seemed to be more focused on the back country/navigation crowd, but this app and the sports tracker site is missing a bunch of features that my user group would expect to be there and instead seems to be focused on social stuff and work out data. I’m sure that’s a much larger user group, but I sure hope some navigation features make it into the app soon.
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@Markus-Hauhia said in Share your experience with the Suunto app here!:
I find the Suunto app to be absolutely terrible, and in my opinion it should see a complete redesign. As far as types of users for these devices go, I’m of the most basic type. I just want to keep track and compare how many kilometers of for example cycling I’ve done between certain periods and compare some basic stats like average heart rate. I also like to use the route and POI features occasionally. These are not currently available in any useful form in the app, except for the bare bones route design -feature. The user interface is also one of the worst I have seen: it manages to be confusing and difficult to use, while at the same time offering next to no features.
What is the purpose of the app? Firstly, for exercise tracking, it only provides very general information, such as a weekly summary of one’s general activity. A 20 euro activity bracelet will do that. Secondly, it’s flooded with social media features that I can’t imagine anyone actually caring about. Why would I ever need to know what route some random person took on his morning jog and what his heart rate was, and why is this prioritized over almost all other features in the UI? All the while the important things (for me), like the calendar view, ability to compare things between given periods of time, performance graphs, UI that doesn’t give me a headache, proper route planning, POIs etc. are absent.
And this is just me: an out of shape guy who’s physical activity mostly consists of cycling to work. I can’t imagine the app serving any purpose whatsoever to the users who the watch was actually designed for. A lack of web interface is a massive detriment too, as a small touch screen is not a useful input method for any serious purpose. The app also appears to be running on the background, draining my battery, without an option to configure it in the settings - I will likely be uninstalling it until it is fixed. I don’t need to use the app throughout day and night. I only need it for few minutes to sync the exercises of the day and maybe some routes occasionally.
I’m sorry for coming through as overly negative, but I’m extremely disappointed in the current state of the app. The best option at this stage, in my opinion, would be to abandon the app entirely and go back to Movescount, as it at least provides the basic functions without having to pay for a third party application. To me it looks like the app development is being lead by accountants: with smart watches eating the market share of dedicated sport watches, they are attempting to cut costs by driving down Movescount, while copy-pasting Sports tracker code and branding it as the new Suunto app. I’m not an accountant, but I can see how that is going to end up working.
First, which watch are you using? Which operating system?
Second, I think the route planning is great on SA but could be improved. POI’s I agree could be helpful. On iOS it is possible to both import and export gpx files for routes, which I find incredibly useful. This allows you to draw a gpx route on any app or screen you want and import into SA, including Strava. The heatmap allows me to identify routes in places I travel to plan runs, again I find that incredibly useful and is not in the MC app. I cannot always be tied to a computer requiring wifi to quickly plan a route!
As far as battery, mine is high but I am on SA checking things for the forum and uploading daily exercises so it is not bad at all given the amount of time I have the app open.
As for web interfaces, this is a hot topic and I am in the minority, Runalyze and TrainingPeaks provide the data I need better than MC did so there are web interfaces albiet 3rd party ones. Runalyze is free.
The functionality of the MC app is far behind the SA app so I do not see this as a good option.
Anyway, I am not connected with Suunto but a forum user like you. I do disagree with some of your statements though.
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@Brad_Olwin I’m using the Spartan Ultra and Android. The route planning works, but it should have the ability to add waypoints and modify the route. What I do like about it is that the routes are pretty detailed and include even smaller foothpaths. I haven’t utilized the heatmaps, but I can see them being useful. The map functionality, I agree, is a big plus over the Movescount app, as previously it needed to be done via a web browser.
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@Markus-Hauhia Be patient, I hope/think that some type of waypoint will come. It is frequently requested. Also, soon on Android you will be able to create route from an exercise and export routes from exercises. These are already implemented in iOS.
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I bought my sunnto 9 knowing that the app had some short comings but I expected suunto to sort them within time, however the app updates are few and far between while painfully small increments.
The watch is sold saying it gives v02 max but that’s not on the app, and can’t even give us hart rate tracking on the app which you can get with products from lidle.
Sadly suunto my watch is up for sale, get you act together
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@Matt_from_Suunto , thanks sunnto if I wasn’t sure before your dismissive response certainly has made my mid up
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The last iOS 1.9.0 update was a nice one with the manual and intervals splits/laps. Big surprise for me, so huge kudos to the dev team!! If only that screen could be made landscape at the turn of the smartphone, that would be great, as more than 4 values would fit in the laps chart (à la Movescount web laps section).
Sadly there’s a lot of catchup to do in SA, but things are coming along. However, until there is no proper web frontend replacement for MC I will stick to MC and refrain from using SA’s routes and sports mode configuration.
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It has been 6 months since I left my previous comment here. I’ve been using Suunto App quite a bit more during those 6 months so hopefully this time I’ll have a more constructive feedback.
I’ve been thinking about why SA triggers such a negative reaction in me, even compared to the very primitive Movescount app. On a surface it looks much more rich and advanced than Movescount. I think the main reason is that it is targeted at a user different than me.
Let’s look what I see when I open Suunto App. Immediately I am prompted with “My week” widget which is supposed to show me a summary of my training week so far. But it completely misses the point. It shows me time across all sports that I’ve been training so far, my time goal, as well as my steps and calories. Do I care about any of those? Absolutely not! Furthermore it doesn’t even capture my week correctly, because I can’t make it to start the week on Monday instead of Sunday (I am in USA, but my training week is Monday to Sunday).
Let’s compare that to Movescount app. In Movescount I see a compact summary of my mileage by sport over the last 30 days. I’ve prefer the current week or month instead but that is still more useful to me than SA’s general fitness goals. Below that in Movescount I see a fairly compact list of my recent activities that is color coded by type of activity. I find that very helpful. The amount of information is certainly very limited but at least the way it is represented is easy to consume on a small phone screen.
Back to SA, at the bottom of the main screen I see a Strava like feed of activities by me and people I follow, with a high focus on the social side of things. First of all each of these entries take more than half the screen so scrolling through these is difficult. Do I really need to see a large “ADD A COMMENT” each taking almost 10% of the screen under each activity? Absolutely not! I already have Strava for this kind of Social stuff and seeing that in Suunto App is the last thing I want. At a minimum, this social feed should be tucked away. And ideally there should be an option that turns it off completely for the majority of Suunto App users who don’t need yet another social platform. The main tab of Suunto App should be focused only on me.
I actually like how it is done in Garmin Connect App. It seems it allows you to choose which widgets you’d like to see on the main screen, be it mileage or steps, or calories. So you see only the data you are interested to see. For example I’d be very interested to see the amount of the vertical gain in the current week. And the remaining recovery time.
OK, let’s switch to the diary. At the top there is a training graph that can be switched between Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly. Good idea, but again, that shows only time, which is of no interest to me. Make it show mileage across all sports and that would be much more useful to me. Let me select a group of sports to include in the mileage, and that would be even more useful. Below the graph is the actual diary - activity log. Somehow it manages to have a very low density of information and at the same time make it very difficult to consume the data. I don’t know what it is? Perhaps it is the weird alignment fields, or using one color only, or the fact that different types of fields are shown for different types of activities, but visually I struggle to quickly find the activities I need in the list. Why not use the colored icons for the sport modes that match the activity log in the watches and Movescount? I think the Movescount style list would be more useful. And furthermore, the diary really has to have a calendar, and to have a way to show key activities / races in a distinct way. I dare anyone to try to find a race that you did a year ago in the list. That is nearly impossible. Strava mobile app does this much better in their activity log.
Now, let’s go into activity details. Here are my thoughts:
- It throws a bunch of data at you at a very disorganized way.
- Again a very large part of screen estate is wasted on social stuff. That should be done via a menu so that it doesn’t take any UI space.
- Graphs - enough has been said about the graphs. They are absolutely terrible on all levels. The feature to show a graph full screen is a nice try but it misses the point. There is no value in seeing an altitude graph alone. I can find what altitude I had at any given point by looking at tooltip, but what is the point? That needs to be shown in relation with other metrics. I want to see time, distance, pace, HR, cadence, and potentially other metrics at the same time. Ideally there should be a way to overlay two or more graphs, but at a minimum multiple metrics should be shown in the tooltip. The pace graph is unusable for trail running. There is a hard-coded scale that ends at 14:00/mile at the bottom, which means a large part of activity is cut off from the graph. I’ve had many activities in mountains where my average pace was slower than 14:00/mile. And in general, pace and speed graphs would benefit from some smoothing for longer multi-hour activities. The way pace and speed graphs are shown in the current version makes them nearly unusable, at least for activities where the pace/speed varies a lot.
- Comparisons to previous activities - I don’t find them useful. That would work only for relatively short activities, and only for someone who it just starting. I don’t see a point to learn that my current run is 60 miles shorter than the previous, because the previous was an ultra-marathon race. My distance varies a lot on purpose. My pace also varies a lot on purpose. So none of this “PREVIOUS” stuff is helpful. The same applies to other comparisons.
- The 30-day summary at the bottom of activity screen could be useful. The main problem is that it is limited to one sport only. My running is combined from 3 sports - road running, trail running, and treadmill. Looking at any one of these in isolation misses the big picture.
Finally I’d like to praise the route editor. I think this is one part of the app that works fairly well, and I use it from time to time to estimate a route for a trail run (even though I don’t sync SA routes to my Suunto 9). The only negative is that it doesn’t show the elevation profile, but overall it is easy to use and very fast, and uses good outdoor oriented maps. Yesterday out of curiosity I installed Garmin Connect App and tried their route editor. Let me tell you, it was so unusable for anything not on roads, and planning a route with it seemed like a really painful process. SA route planner is way way better in comparison.
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I’ve used a suunto watch and the suunto app for a couple of weeks now, although i have been quite happy with it i’ve become more and more frustrated with the whole thing. This varies from literally strange inconsistancies like the week running from monday till sunday on the watch and from sunday till saturday on the app, to more frustrating things like inconsistencies between the sync of the watch and the app. For example I’ve done several workouts where the watch will give for example 1000 calories burned while the app says 1250 calories burned? Like how is this possible, the app gets the info from the watch, right? Another workout I’ve done said 670 calories burned while the watch gave an overall active amount of calories burned stuck on 645, thats so frustrating… I’m really thinking about returning this watch and just switchting to Garmin with things like this the whole thing just becomes not trustworthy.
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@silentvoyager Good points and well said. I agree.
