Your Members Don't Compare You to Other Gyms

On Tuesday your member goes for a run. Strava logs it, maps it, tells her what her heart did on the hill. On Wednesday she's on your floor for the 6:15 class, and the first thing she does through the door is open your app to check in.

Walking, the gym and running are the three things Australians actually do with their bodies, according to AusPlay, and it's largely the same people doing them, spread across a week. Which means the same phone. Her Tuesday app and her Wednesday app sit a thumb's width apart on one screen. She has never once thought of that as a comparison.

Over the past two months we measured it anyway. We looked up the member app of every major Australian gym, studio and fitness brand on the App Store, curated 62 of them by hand, and put the lot in a public index: ratings, publishers, update history, what each listing promises. Then we lined the member apps up against the consumer apps their members already train with. Sweat, Strava, KIC and that tier.

The shipping gap

The consumer fitness apps in the index are made by companies whose entire business is the app, and it shows. Across the 18 of them, the median gap since the last App Store update is five days. Median rating: 4.78 stars. The lowest-rated one sits at 3.8, and most sit above 4.5.

The member apps of gyms and studios run on a different clock. Across the 44 in the index, the median gap since the last update is 36 days. Seven haven't shipped anything in over a year. The median rating reads a respectable 4.68, but medians are kind: 12 of the 44 sit under three stars. Six of those belong to major brands, a hundred-plus ratings each. Enough members turned up to leave a verdict.

We're not naming the six. The index is public and refreshes monthly, and every operator knows how to look up their own listing. Who isn't the point. The point is that a quarter of this market is fielding an app its own members rate as a two-star experience, on a phone where a 4.8-star training app is one swipe away.

Same member, different apps

When operators compare their app at all, they compare it with other member apps: the club across the road, the vendor's other sites, the franchise up the coast. Measured that way, most member apps look fine.

Members never took that measurement. The person who opened Strava at 6am on Tuesday is the person opening your app on Wednesday. Same phone, same thumb, completely different product experience, and she can feel the difference even if she'd never put it in those words. Her sense of what a fitness app should be was set by software that ships every five days, and it came into your club with her. Nobody consciously marks your booking screen down against Strava. It works the way adherence works: one ordinary day at a time, on one phone, until the feeling has settled in.

What surprised us

Two things, in just two months of refreshing the index.

First, the bottom of this market doesn't stay put. Two of the apps we started tracking in July have since vanished from the App Store entirely. Both sat at the bottom of the ratings table, at 1.0 and 1.3 stars. Badly rated member apps don't linger; they get quietly deleted, and sometimes relaunched with a clean ratings history.

Second, an oddity at the other end of the update table. Of the seven apps that haven't shipped anything in over a year, four still hold 4.7 stars or better. A star rating is a lifetime average, and it keeps coasting on old goodwill long after the shipping stops. That makes the headline number a lagging indicator of how an app feels to use today. If anything, that means the table above is the generous reading. The current experience lives somewhere else: in the newest reviews. (We read those fifty at a time in the App Pulse; operators can too.)

Where this leaves operators

We think there's a real opportunity in the gap between those two clocks. A member app doesn't just need to handle bookings and class timetables anymore. Members are used to fitness products that feel alive: new features, better experiences, useful content, reasons to come back. The check-in your member performs in your app is the most frequent touch your brand has with her, more frequent than the front desk, the coach or any email you'll ever send. For a quarter of this market, that touch happens inside software its own users rate below three stars.

If your app is sitting on the same home screen as Strava, Sweat or KIC, that's the benchmark you're competing against. Not the gym down the road.

The full data is in The Gym App Index, brand by brand, public App Store data, refreshed monthly. Look up your own app. Then have a look at what's sitting beside it.