Beta 4.0 — running comes to FITOS

Beta 4.0 is the first part of running in FITOS. Training now has two halves, Gym and Running, chosen at the top. It opens on Gym as before.

Record a run

• Tap Start run, choose outdoor or treadmill, and set a goal if you want one: a distance (1 km up to a marathon), a time or a pace.
• While you run you see your time, distance and average pace in big numbers. Swipe for your pace right now, your speed, your last kilometre, how much you've climbed and the calories.
• Your route draws itself on the map as you go.
• Auto-pause stops the clock when you stop, for example at a crossing, and starts it again when you run. You can switch it off in Running settings.
• The lock button stops pocket taps. Hold the button to unlock.
• Your phone vibrates at every kilometre, and FITOS tells you your time for it. It vibrates again when you reach your goal.

Screen off? It keeps going

You can turn the screen off or switch to music. FITOS keeps recording, and its notification shows your time and distance. If your phone closes FITOS during a run, nothing recorded is lost: the run comes back paused at your last point.

The first time, FITOS asks you to set its Battery setting to Unrestricted. Please do. Samsung phones may otherwise stop FITOS in the background, and that would stop your run.

After the run

You get a summary: the map, your time and pace for each kilometre, a pace and elevation chart, and the calories. Give the run a name, say how hard it felt (1 to 10), add a note, then Save, or Discard it.

Your runs are in the history under Running, with this week's and this month's totals and a little map for each run.

Share it

Open a run and tap Share:

• A picture of your route on the map, with the distance, time and pace, for WhatsApp, Instagram or your gallery.
• A GPX file that Strava, Garmin Connect and most running apps can import.

Both leave out the first and last 200 m of your route by default, so a shared map doesn't show where you live. You can turn that off for any share.

Your privacy

FITOS records your location only while a run is recording, and only with "while using the app" permission, never "all the time". Runs are kept with your account, so they're safe if you change phones. They're in Download my data, and they're deleted with your account.

The privacy policy now says this, and that the maps come from OpenFreeMap. You'll be asked to accept the new version once.

Also

On a phone set to large text, the screen for starting a gym plan no longer cuts off its words.

What's next

Next comes a voice coach that tells you to ease off or pick up the pace, interval sessions, and 5K, 10K, half-marathon and marathon plans. After that, records like your fastest 5 km and 10 km, badges, route replay and runs from a Galaxy Watch.

Getting it

Download beta 4.0. It installs over beta 3.9 and keeps all your data. The download is a little bigger this time (39 MB) because of the maps.