Important news concerning our digital services
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are some of the moderators counting how many existing customer here are voicing out to abandon the Brand and quitting Suunto after just two days passed with the Jan.15 announcement and the news for "old’ devices are not supported in next year? this is more as alarming for the decision maker at Suunto…
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Adding my voice.
I bought Suunto Ambit in beginning of 2013 because I saw Movescount and was very impressed by its capabilities. That was leagues ahead of anything I could do in Garmin Connect. I was really proud of my Ambit that served me well and less than two years later I upgraded to Ambit3. I kept recommending Ambit3 and Movescount to everyone, easily to hundreds of people, describing powerful analysis scenarios that could be done with Movescount that weren’t possible on other platforms. This year I upgraded to Suunto 9 - my third Suunto watch. I should mention I was somewhat reluctant to upgrade to Suunto 9 because I was already seeing a trend of Suunto discontinuing some features that made the Ambit line so great.And now this! Suunto replaces a great platform that is still one of the best with a half-baked toy app which in my opinion is worse than Strava, and that means a lot!
There are many features of Movescount that seems to be lost in transition that I afraid are never coming back. And giving Suunto’s recent track record of dropping Ambit features in Spartan and Suunto 9 models I don’t have much confidence that Suunto App will evolve into a comprehensive platform like Movescount is!
A few examples of what Movescount has that I think SA will never have:
- Ability to overlay multiple arbitrary metrics and align their progression with the track on map. For example I can see how my cadence changed on different parts of the course or what was my vertical speed on a long climb and whether I could sustain it over longer time, or how my EPOC changed over a duration of a longer efforts, which would show of how sustainable my effort was.
- I could come up with my own synthetic metrics and graph them just like any built-in metrics. How about time ahead/behind a goal pace during a marathon? Would SA ever have anything like that?
- I could switch between distance and time on x-axis and zoom into arbitrary parts of my activity and find e.g. all stops that I did during a run and how much time total I was stopped.
- I could aggregate arbitrary metrics over time over multiple activities to see trends. SA offers some of that for a few specific metrics, but that is limited to last 30 days only. I couldn’t see trends for arbitrary metrics like average cadence or vertical gain.
- I could easily see breakdown by multiple sports. SA is very one-sided and seems to be geared more towards general fitness crowd rather than multi-sport athletes.
- I could design routes with waypoints - all in one place without having to deal with multiple services. And I could search for public routes that others already created on Movescount and use them on my watch.
- I could manage multiple Suunto watches with one account.
Anyway, I could probably continue like that. It is very sad that Suunto is throwing its baby with bathwater just because it needed a more modern smartphone app. This will erode trust of many loyal customers. I doubt that many current Ambit/Ambit2/Ambit3 users will upgrade to newer Suunto watches after this.
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@silentvoyager said in Important news concerning our digital services:
Suunto replaces a great platform that is still one of the best with a half-baked toy app which in my opinion is worse than Strava
fully agree, thanks for summarizing so well the advantages movescount.com has compare to the Suunto App in terms of training analysis, trending, deep data handling, multiple activity compare and review and multi device support, Kudos for this!
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Definitely, this is a perfect example for business schools and communication teachers: “How a big company is perfectly capable to create a solution for a non-existent problem, and how to try to teach clients to see an unicorn when you are showing just a slipper, if they can’t see the unicorn, it doesn’t matter, you could maintain your position, or let some employers with no charge dealing with anger clients”.
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@ColdBeer said in Important news concerning our digital services:
company is perfectly capable to create a solution for a non-existent problem
exactly, instead of using an working solution and adopt them to new watches, they take an complete outsider solution tuning it up exclusively for a new watch (Suunto Fitness) and after an year asking:
“Hey, do we really need support old watches as well? By the way, how many different types are out there? Ah, so many … let’s announce them EOL”Lunatic!
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@silentvoyager wow, I didn’t know movescount can do all that. I’m a new suunto user so went straight to SA, now having second thoughts even though I like SA basic functionality. Emphasis ‘basic’.
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@Droro
Movescount web is great for workout analysis. SA currently only serves to sync workouts. Full stop.You should try it at least for the remaining time it still has
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I want to start off by saying that I know as little about the future direction of the SA or Suunto’s plans going forward as anyone else commenting here, but that said I will add what I do know:
The Suunto App is very much a work in progress, and there are – at least – another 18 months to go before the company would consider it ready enough for prime time for it to scrap Movescount.
While SA still has leaps and bounds by which it needs to improve to have even some of MC’s basic functionality (cough, POIs, cough, exporting FIT files, cough), it has improved by enormous leaps and bounds in far less time than that already.
I’ve been using the app as a beta with my Spartan since early last spring, shortly after the Android beta became available. All it did back then was pull workout data from the watch and put it in the Sports Tracker database, if I could get it to connect at all. No sending those workouts off to any other services, no diary section with step counts, calories, sleep tracking, etc. No control of the watch at all: no customization whatsoever, no route planning, no heatmaps, nothing. It looked and worked like an experimental version of the Sports Tracker app that could pull a little data from a few watches. The ability to do any of those other things in the app has been built from scratch over the course of the last eight months or so.
While a heck of a lot clearly remains to be done over the next 18 months before Movescount goes away (and remember, that’s the minimum amount of time, it could stay around for longer than that), what remains to be done, while significant, is window dressing compared to what’s already been done in half that time, which probably explains why the company saw fit to announce the eventual changeover now.
And for people with Ambit3s and Traverses, consider this: the app didn’t work at all with any of those watches until a couple of months ago. A couple of months of basic functionality versus a minimum of 18 months of active development to go before Movescount leaves. A lot can happen between now and then, and a lot more has happened in half that time.
All that said, if I had an older watch like a T6 or an Ambit2 or didn’t use a smartphone, I’d probably be singing a very different tune right now. Here’s what we do know right now: the company only said Movescount will eventually go away. There was no word about Suuntolink, Moveslink or Moveslink2 going anywhere. As long as those things continue to be able to link a watch with a computer, update GPS, and get workout data onto that computer in some straightforward manner for users to be able to do with it whatever they want, all that actually remains to be done to ensure continued full functionality is for there to be a way for users to get routes and settings from their computer to the watch; there’s no reason Movescount has to be necessary for any of that in the future.
That said, I wish Suunto had been a heck of a lot more clear about all of that in their statement the other day, especially with watches and users needing a cable to computer connection. One of the biggest reasons I got a Spartan when I finally decided to join the 21st century and get a GPS watch was Suunto’s reputation for making durable, long lasting stuff. It’s really central to their image, and when poking through the guts of different companies’ websites and finding that Suunto continued to make available support software downloads for watches that were made 12 to 15 years ago, that’s one of the things that most convinced me to go in this direction: that they did in fact have things that old that were still in the wild, still being used, and still being supported. If that were to all change now, that would change everything, and not in a good way.
But there’s still at least a year and a half to go and a lot more that can be cleared up and changed over an awful lot of time, so for now I remain hopeful. -
@Tryfgr HI, you can get a huge amount of what you need from Strava without paying. Their free app tracks and generates maps, even annual stats for your workouts. The only feature I know I don’t have is the heat map, a nice feature when traveling to new places but otherwise not essential. And Strava sticks a little more to the facts of the workout and avoids all the undocumented advice about recovery times and energy estimates. I have never been very convinced of those stats, given how little backup literature Suunto has provided about them.
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@ianshowalter said in Important news concerning our digital services:
not sure it’s only ‘window dressing’ what’s left to do in SA but fair comment, may I ask do you use beside the SA the movescount.com website with your SSU before or parallel or only the app?
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@Tobias-F I’ve been and I continue to use both in parallel. One big sticking point for me so far preventing a full switch has been the lack of ability to set POIs on the watch from the Suunto app.
Someone above mentioned Strava as a free alternative for maps and some stats; that’s what I used to track runs with my phone for years before getting a watch and I have the Suunto App automatically sending everything over there.
Another good free site that frankly does analytics way better than Strava is Runalyze. It doesn’t sync at all with Movescount; at present I manually export FIT or TCX files of every workout from there and manually upload them to Runalyze. However, the site did mention in an end of year blog post that it will begin automatically syncing with the Suunto App sometime early this year. So be on the lookout for that sometime soon. -
Removal of web based services and moving towards purely App based services whilst pointing users to third party software is quite simply a step backwards.
I’m no tech geek but Movescount is a cracking tool for reviewing your data and a suitable tool for route planning/review. Regardless of the power/functions of the new app it will be limited by its screen size at the very least.
Garmin did something similar with the 310xt (gpx traces became a nightmare to upload) and that prompted me to buy the Suunto Ambit 3 peak based on my partners positive experiences with her Ambit 2 (which will now become a paperweight???).
Maybe it is time for me to move on again as I am not a happy bunny with this decision.
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@ianshowalter thanks for feedback, got it!
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@rsmacleod Strava is Social Media. Over and out.
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Maps need large screens, small screens are not useful and create fatigue, not matter how good the app is. Loosing the web would be a disaster
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I could understand a reasonable Suunto web subscription, like starting at 15€/year. The service it’s just as relevant as the watch, they are not separate things.
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there might be different views, if MC is a perfect tool, but definetily there needs to be a web based tool in ADDITION to any app. viewing my tracks on a smart phone is a nice gimmick, planning moves, viewing maps, i prefer to do on my 24" screen.
I sincerely hope an pray, that Suunto is listening to their customers, to snub your customers is never a good choice… (eg Nokia) especially as i cannot imagine anyone who is getting a benefit by switching off the web base service (beside some potential cost savings on Suunto’s side), but this “gain” will become a trojan horse, once customers are moving off… -
Suunto, how about an offline standalone windows movescount programme? I don’t know how technically difficult that would be, but it would enable most of us with older devices to do most of the things we need. Examples:-Every time I run under power lines in a snowstorm I get a spiked HR reading - this throws out the TE value for all subsequent sessions until I reset the max HR via movescount. If I want to customise the screens for a particular event or sport I can only do it via movescount. Likewise for entering waypoints, reviewing routes etc. I’d be happy to store my data on my own laptop and the only thing I would really miss would be the satellite updates - but how important are these anyway?- I never update my car GPS. I don’t think we need it to be online, so if you could produce such a programme (and maybe most of it already exists in the current movescount) I think you would go a long way towards mitigating the problem and satisfying owners of older devices.
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in case, please dont limit to windows - there are also mac users out there…
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@martin-groschner
And Linux -
Could be implemented using the Electron Framework. Running on Windows, Mac and Linux.
