Noom’s Android Fitness App Another Example Of Why Smartphones Are The Original Wearable Computers

Summary: For aspiring Quantified Selfers who don’t want to bother with additional hardware, Noom has launched a new smartphone-based pedometer app.

Here’s a confession: I own a Fitbit One (see disclosure) activity tracker, but I rarely use it these days. There are several reasons for my negligence (which could fill a post of their own) but one of the key reasons is that I just don’t want to deal with another device. Yes, you could chock it up to laziness. But, over time, the benefits of knowing my daily steps and distances traveled stopped outweighing the hassle of figuring out where to fasten the device each morning and remembering to remove it each night — not to mention charging it every so often before the battery died.

Fortunately, more developers are creating fitness tracking smartphone apps meant to monitor 24/7 activity without draining a smartphone battery. Earlier this year, startup ProtoGeo launched the Moves app on IOS to track users’ daily steps and locations traversed. And, on Tuesday, activity apps startup Noom launched Walk as a “social” smartphone-based pedometer for Android phones.