Runkeeper Drops Support For Windows Phone Don’t See The Big Picture

In a recent blog post the team behind the popular app Runkeeper announced that they would be pulling their support for Windows Phone 7 based on low usage. While I understand the position, I find it incredible that many of these app teams are not seeing the big picture with Windows 8. Yesterday, Steve Ballmer predicted that Windows 8 will sell 500 Million copies by the end of 2013 and for the life of me I can’t figure out why any app developer would ignore that number.

Here is a quote from their Windows Phone post

The first such announcement is now:  going forward, the RunKeeper app will no longer be officially supported on Windows Phone 7 or Symbian.  We expanded onto each platform in the last year or so.  Combined, they make up less than 1.5% of our total user base.  We don’t see this changing any time soon, these platforms simply haven’t kept up with Android and iPhone, and we only see this gap increasing over time.  We can’t justify giving our Windows and Symbian apps the support they need to be up to our quality standards, and if they can’t be up to our quality standards, they shouldn’t be at all.

With Windows 8 really merging of the platforms between desktop and Phone it seems like such a no brainer to have apps that run as a Windows 8 Metro style application then you can port it over to Windows Phone. I cannot tell people how to run their company, however I still find run keepers position a bit surprising. For an alternative exercise app the do point out that Endomondo Sports Tracker is a good app to use.

{You can read their full blog post on their site }

Tagged as: Endomondo, RunKeeper