Re: Steps counting apps

Jim the Geordie, 2024-05-16 11:43:

Just out of curiosity I thought I might try a STEPS counter app.
Many seem to come with all sorts of health monitoring extras, which I'm
not bothered about, but happy to enter and not use.
However there are massive differences between them on the numbers of
steps they claim I have taken and some don't appear to work at all.
I'm not wanting to start a thread about the health benefits, just to
find the simplest, accurate, free one.

If your phone does not have a built in step counting sensor, apps can
only "guess" the steps by using the values provided by the accelerometer
and trying to find out, what acceleration change counts as "step". In
addition to save energy the app can not constantly monitor the sensor,
so the determined values will not be very accurate.

Ideally the app should also inform you, if no step counter values are
available (also see
<https://developer.android.com/health-and-fitness/guides/basic-fitness-app/read-step-count-data?hl=en>)
and it has to "guess" the values based on accelleration sensor data.

--
Arno Welzel
https://arnowelzel.de