Bare Bones Power Meter
Power. Heart rate. A graph. Nothing else.
Power. Heart rate. A graph. Nothing else.
I have a Kurt Kinetic inRide power meter. It used to have a free app that showed you your power output. Simple, worked fine.
Then Kurt Kinetic got bought by a bigger fitness company, and that app got folded into a platform that wanted an account, my data, and a subscription — to show me the output of a power meter I'd already paid for.
I didn't want any of that. I just wanted the number. So I built this. It does one thing. It'll keep doing that one thing whether or not I ever sell another copy, because I'm not selling it as a subscription — I'm selling it once, and then I'm done, and so are you.
There's a word for what happened to the old app: enshitification. Products get worse and more expensive as their owners look for more ways to extract value from you. This is my small refusal to do that to anyone -- not me, not you.
Two big numbers at the top of your screen: power and heart rate. A small graph underneath so you can see the last few minutes. That's the whole app.
No account. No dashboard. No feed. No badges. No "kudos," no social network. It reads your sensors and shows you the numbers.
Bummer. Ask Apple for a refund, it's set to auto-approve any request.
If you're curious, it should read any power meter that (a) uses Bluetooth LE and (b) reports power using either the Cycling Power Measurement format (aka BLE Cycling Power Service) or the Indoor Bike Data format (aka BLE Fitness Machine Service).
But if it doesn't work for yours, well, bummer. The point was never to make an app that solved everyone's problems. It was to solve one specific, stupid problem I had. If it doesn't solve yours, that's fine. Get your refund and go about your happy life. You don't owe me an angry email or a one-star review to make that happen.
$9.99, once.
Not a subscription. You pay one time and you own it. Forever. No auto-renewal, no "premium tier," no ads to get you to upgrade. There's no cookies or marketing or tracking. You'll never see bike-related ads because you used this app.
| Bare Bones Power Meter | Typical cycling app | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $9.99 once | ~$79.99/year, forever |
| Account required | No | Yes |
| Features | Power, heart rate, graph | Everything |
Download on the App Store (link goes live at launch)