Sweatcoins Pays you on your foot steps

Sweatcoin is a new breed of step counter and activity tracker app that pays you digital currency - sweat coin – for your steps to spend on gadgets, sports kit, fitness training, healthy nutrition and much much more …

On a recent evening with a windchill of 11 degrees, I made myself put down a book I had been enjoying and go out on the streets of New York instead.

I wasn’t heading out to meet friends or do my errands. I was braving the cold for a less virtuous purpose: amassing credit on Sweatcoin, a free fitness app that awards points — “sweatcoins” — for walking or running outside.

Accumulate 550 sweatcoins, the app beckoned, and I could snag a Fitbit Flex wearable fitness tracker. So there I was on an Arctic evening, deliberately taking a circuitous route to inflate my step count.

Sweatcoin’s popularity began to spike last summer. By early September, it had become the most downloaded health and fitness application in the United States on the iOS and Google Play stores combined, according to data from App Annie, an analytics firm. It has retained that top ranking nearly every week since.

The app, developed by a start-up in London called Sweatco, has raised about $1.6 million in financing and expects to close another round soon. It taps into the boom for health-tracking apps and devices, joining products from Apple, Fitbit, Garmin and Samsung that monitor stats like heart rate and physical activity. Nearly 350 million wearable tech devices are expected to be sold globally this year, according to forecasts from Gartner, a market research company.

The Sweatcoin app uses an algorithm to verify users’ outdoor steps and issue points called “sweatcoins.” But the app often gives less credit than many people expect. When a reporter walked 3,559 steps, most of them outside, the app converted only 1,319 into sweatcoins.

Anton Derlyatka, left, a founder of Sweatcoin, and Ranbir Arora, an executive at the company. The app’s “first premise is that physical movement has economic value,” Mr. Derlyatka said.

Credit

Andrew Testa for The New York Times

For one thing, Sweatcoin immediately shaves your sweatcoin earnings by 5 percent — in the fine print, the app calls it a commission “to keep our lights on.”

For another thing, the app counts only the steps it thinks you took outside. Bummer. I would get no credit for Zumba, spinning — or listening to music playlists and dancing around my kitchen while cooking.

To help it distinguish outdoor steps, Sweatcoin collects and analyzes GPS signals and motion data from your phone. To improve accuracy, it instructs users to turn off the app’s battery-saver mode and keep the app running in the background.

Frustrated, I turned to reviews on Reddit, Twitter, and app storewhere missing points are a common theme“ Where are my missing 3000 steps!” Ian Wynne, a sports performance consultant in Britain, wrote on Twitter. “This is happening a little too often.”