Michael Reed looks at an open source Android app that can track your fitness.

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While testing, we found a bug that stopped FitoTrack from starting up on a given smartphone. We reported the bug to the issue tracker (https:// codeberg. org/jannis/ FitoTrack/ issues), and Jannis fixed it and pushed out the update in an hour or so. Now, that’s service!

Maybe you need something to motivate you to get into shape. Or perhaps you’re already working out and you’re interested in documenting your exertions. FitoTrack is an open source fitness tracking app that runs on Android devices such as phones and tablets. You can use it to track activities such as running and cycling, and all you need is a smartphone to start logging your performance while building up long-term records.

By examining the data, you can make all sorts of useful discoveries about your progress, along with areas in which you can improve.

FitoTrack describes itself as being privacyorientated. By that, it means that it doesn’t automatically upload your data to a server. It does, however, have facilities for uploading to the cloud, so the data can be backed up or shared.

The application tracks your movement and logs that data. From this, it can calculate things such as the total distance covered, the route taken and other data such as your heart rate, as transmitted from a device such as a fitness band. You can also cross-reference this data through the built-in mapping, meaning that you can find out, for example, what your speed was at a certain point during a run.

The data can be exported in an open format called GPX for further scrutiny on a desktop machine, and we’ll be looking at a Linux tool you can use for that. It has built-in workout types for common activities such as running and cycling, and it’s reasonably extensible, meaning that you can add custom activity types, too.

Your first workout

Begin by obtaining a copy of FitoTrack from either the Google Play store if you’re mad (https://play.google.com) or, of course, F-Droid (https://f-droid.org), a hub for open source Android applications such as this.

When you first run the application, it immediately invites you to set some configuration options, such as your preferred unit types. Note that there is a useful setting that mixes imperial and metric units, so that distances and speeds are in miles, and things such as elevations are in metres. Inputting your body weight is worth doing because this increases the precision of the calorie-consumption calculations.