Strong Foundation
Before we get into the guts of this thing I’ll give you all a little bit of a preamble. I’ve been a physically active person for the greater part of 11 years (when I first started wrestling in high school). Up until I graduated college all of my workouts were hand crafted by one of my coaches, and up until I graduated college this was enough. After I ended my collegiate wrestling career, I also dive mouth first into the life of overeating and not working out enough. For the first few months it was awesome, and I was fat and happy. But over the course of the last year and a half I didn’t like how I looked in the mirror nor the 60+ lbs I put on.
That’s where Strong Foundation (SF) comes into play. In the months I’ve been trying to get myself back into that “good pair of jeans”. While on my journey I’ve tried numerous diets, and workouts. To track all of that I used JeFit to manage my workouts, and Samsung Health to manage my meals, weight plan etc., and I have my pretty cool Galaxy Watch to sync all that data to Samsung Health on my behalf. So what’s the problem?
The problem is, JeFit and Samsung Health are great apps, but I hate having to manage multiple apps to achieve one goal. It wouldn’t be so bad if the two apps shared data so I’d only have to enter data in one and it’d sync with the other, but alas they do not, so I suffered through it a bit and eventually got discouraged from entering data altogether. Yup I’m lazy, it was only two apps, but would a lazy person build their app to get rid of two? Only a software engineer would.
SF is my attempt in writing a micro-frontend based fitness app. My aim is to build a fitness app that will encompass the majority if not all aspects of fitness and health (including but not limited to diet, meal prep, mental health, workout etc.), but allowing user’s to opt-into only the experiences they wish to use. While each experience in itself will be independent of one another, they can work together if the data is there. The secret weapon SF brings to the table is its ability to sync with other fitness ecosystems. SF as it stands today can connect to Samsung Health, Fitbit, and Google Fit.
SF’s ability to connect to these environments was the major motivator for writing this app. I wanted an app that could connect to Samsung Health to easily read data that was synced from my Galaxy Watch, and I could enter data in either app and have them be synchronized. I chose to include Fitbit and Google Fit as they are the other two major players in the fitness tracking game (exempting Apple since SF is Android only at the moment).
Where is SF now? It is currently listed on the Google Play Store in early access. At the time of this writing what can we do?
- Build custom workouts
- Build custom meal plans for every day of the week
- Build a diet to suit your needs
- Create a weight goal with weekly progressions
- Grocery list built around meals of your choosing
- The system can be updated to imperial or metric
- Read various data from Samsung Health, Fitbit, and Google Fit
What’s Ahead?
There’s a lot I want to do with SF, and I put a lot of pressure on it, but if nothing ever comes of it publicly it’s the first app I made for myself that I listed publicly on the app store, so if no one else uses it I will. But here’s what I look to accomplish is the near future:
- Enhance the auto workout generation feature
- Add support for yoga sequences and Tabata flows
- Add workout dictation for yoga sequences and Tabata flows
- Add support for time-based workouts
- Enhance meal prep and recipe management experiences
- Become a Samsung Health partner (so production users can pair with Samsung Health; sorry non-devs)
If any of this has sounded good to you please check out Strong Foundation on the Google Play Store, take a peek at the Kanban and bug board on Taigo to check out features are under development, and let me know what needs to be fixed.
