Rowing in Motion for Android – now with Analytics Login

Rowing in Motion for Android marks a big milestone for us – not only in a technical sense but also business-wise. It is our vision to produce tools that help rowers and coaches make their training more effective and achieve better results. The Boat App to record your rowing performance is only the first step towards that goal. We believe that the real power from using our system comes from analyzing this rowing data, which enables a wide range of applications from tracking an athletes development to matching crews and comparing race tactics. For this purpose, we have created Analytics, an online platform where you can store and analyze rowing sessions recorded with Rowing in Motion. We have some great plans for future products, and those will eventually see the Boat App as one of many products that you can use to record detailed rowing data for analysis so it makes sense to change our user experience model too.

The Boat App for Android is our first attempt to seamlessly integrate the App as and Analytics. Starting with the latest version (available to beta testers as of today), the App requires a one-time linking to an Analytics account on its first launch.  This concept is similar to e.g. to Dropbox, where you need an online Account to use the App.

This also means that we are going to change our business model accordingly. Instead of selling the App we are going to give it away for free on Google Play. Using the App will require a subscription to Analytics that you can then use from all your devices. One upside of this approach is that we can eventually give customers the flexibility to use Rowing in Motion with both iOS and Android devices without paying for the App twice. And we will have a much better story for clubs and organizations that want to provide Rowing in Motion to groups of coaches and athletes by taking out the hassle of buying multiple licenses through an App Store.

Nothing is fixed yet, but subscriptions for Analytics will likely come in three tiers, with a free basic tier, an athlete tier and a third one for coaches and clubs. The Sign in Button will take you to the browser, where you can log in to your analytics account or register a new one. To make your life as easy possible, we allow creating an account  by authenticating with a 3rd party account that you may already have (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Facebook or any OpenId provider).

When you have logged in to your Analytics account, Analytics will take you back to the App and link this device to your account. This linking process will give the App full access to your Analytics account, so you can seamlessly upload logfiles without manually entering upload credentials.

Linking a device is a one-time process and once you have successfully completed the process, you won’t be bothered again for the length of the subscription period (probably yearly). The App can still be used offline and it does not require an internet connection. except for uploading and all other Analytics features of course.

You can view the list of devices linked against your account on Analytics in your Profile section and manually revoke a devices’ access to your account, which is useful should you loose your device or get a new one. We will likely impose an upper limit of the numbers of device you can link to an account to avoid abuse.

Another cool side effect of this integration between Analytics and the App is that we will actually bring Analytics directly into the App. A lot of planned features will take advantage of this, but that’s a topic for another post…