| I would love to see this executed well so here are my scrambled thoughts on this. I have been lifting for around 5 years with a powerlifting focus and have used various program specific Excel sheets found online, Strong on iOS, Progression on Android, and thesquatrack.com back when it first entered beta(3 years ago maybe). - I hate Excel sheets and using them on mobile has always been a pain. - Strong was fine, the UI/UX was incredible. It was just lacking something to tie me to it and I'm not sure if I ever figured out what that was. - Progression is the only one I have tried since moving to Android recently. I hated it. The UI was just alright and it forced a timer on me that stuck around even when the app was in the background and I never found a way to turn off that feature so I uninstalled. There wasn't much data analysis as far as I could tell. - thesquatrack.com was by far the best I have ever used and seen. I stopped using it because there were a few instances of reliability issues and I just never came back to it. It has not been in active development for at least the last two years. The website was mostly mobile friendly and the UI was nothing fancy but it was good enough. It had a good range of exercises available. Exercise input was simplistic but powerful - having the option to input individual sets or batch them was nice. I really liked the rep max tracking and how it was noted on completing every workout. The graphs were great for analyzing almost everything. It had a decent program feature with maybe 10 programs. It had integration with LoseIt! for nutrition tracking but I use MyFitnessPal and apparently the dev was never able to get access to their API, so I have no input on that feature. It would be a nice integration if done correctly especially if used for graphs and analysis. It had a social media aspect which was cool. - I never paid for thesquatrack, there were no paid features at the time I joined but once they were added I think it was for a subscription fee which was quite pricey. I don't think I paid for Progression but I did pay for Strong. I would gladly pay an up front cost for membership to a hosted instance of something like you're describing even if it is open source. - I think a web app really limits your discoverability. I don't think I would've ever found thesquatrack.com if I didn't see the few reddit posts about it but Strong and Progression were easy to find as they were on app store charts. |
I think I'll check out thesquatrack.com for some ideas.
Regarding your point about native vs web apps: I have never built a native app before. That said, I'm sure it can't be all that difficult. I have built my back end to be fully decoupled from the front end and work entirely through an API. Shouldn't be too difficult to get the data onto a mobile device. Something new to learn I guess. I have also heard about "native" apps; where the app is "installed" on the device, but it really just opens up a windowless browser.
Thank you!