Nike might not be interested in making its Fuelband fitness app Android-friendly (for now). But Jawbone isn’t going to leave Android-bearing health tracking enthusiasts in the lurch.
Four months after releasing its new Jawbone UP fitness band and iOS app, the San Francisco-based company on Wednesday that it had launched an app for Android.
“Everyone wants to improve upon themselves; we’ve found this to be a fundamental human desire, no matter where a person is starting from or what they want to achieve,” Travis Bogard, Jawbone vice president of product management and strategy, said in a statement. “Today marks a big step toward our commitment to help people establish a basis for behavior change by bringing UP to everyone who wants to live better lives.”
As competition ramps up among companies bringing quantified self-type gadgets to the market, it makes sense that Jawbone doesn’t want to leave Android fans (a sizeable share of smartphone users) without an app of their own. Jawbone’s UP, Nike’s Fuelband, the Misfit Shine, as well as devices from Fitbit (see disclosure below), Striiv and FitBug all promise wannabe fitness enthusiasts different levels of activity tracking and they all would love to be the stewards of the growing mounds of fitness- and health-related data. Neither Jawbone nor Nike has shared the number of people using their fitness bands but about one year after launching, Nike said that 11 million people were a part of the Nike+ community.
In addition to launching on Android, Jawbone also said that it had returned to Europe (the company offered its initial UP band in the US and Europe as well).
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