RunKeeper today announced that they are dropping support for Windows 7 and Nokia Symbian. I think you will start to see more app developers follow this trend. If you are an app developer, it makes sense to target the biggest platforms, iPhone and Android, first. At my day job, one of the things that we do is develop iPhone and Android apps for our hardware products. Right now, we don’t support Blackberry, Symbian or Windows 7. The cold hard truth is that right now, it just doesn’t pay for itself. With all of the operating system software updates coming multiple times a year, it is hard enough to keep up, and still develop new great apps. Here is the post taken directly from their site:
As we mentioned the other day, we’re getting back to our roots and focusing on the stuff that matters. We had spread ourselves too thin, and it was inhibiting our ability to build the best possible core product. As part of this refocusing, we are having a bunch of tough discussions internally. In order to do more of the stuff that matters, we need to do less of the stuff that doesn’t.
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 userbase. 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. And don’t even get us started on Blackberry 
For those that have the app already on one of these platforms, you can continue to use it. However, the app will be removed from the app marketplace on each platform by tomorrow, and no further updates will come on either platform going forward. We apologize to our Windows and Symbian users. We understand that this is not what you wanted to hear. But we need to be laser-focused as a company, and it would be irresponsible for us to come to any other conclusion. If you are looking for alternatives to RunKeeper on Windows, we have heard Endomondo is good. For Symbian, you could try Sports Tracker. You can also export any and all of your RunKeeper data here.
For everyone else, we hope this starts to assure you that our renewed focus is not just about words, but about action as well. This isn’t the last of the cutting of things that are non-strategic, and this cutting will only enable us to pour more resources into the most important parts of what we do. We commit to you that we will continue to listen very carefully, and to keep you informed every step of the way. Onwards!
The RunKeeper Team
From an earlier post, RunKeeper has over over 10 million users, and just received another $10M in funding. It looks like they are on the move. We will be reviewing RunKeeper, and other phone apps over the next few months.
Happy Training
