The first month of any new year we always see an uptick on health and wellness searches, app downloads, and basically any digital product that focuses on fitness, diets, etc. The newest Samsung Health app update will bring a new feature called Group Challenges that will do as the name says. It lets you invite friends to join you on a health or fitness challenge and if you’re all pretty competitive, it can spur you on to finish whatever challenge you’ve agreed upon.
The Group Challenge feature can be found within the Samsung Health app itself so no need to install a separate app. You can create a challenge from the Together section of the app then invite up to 9 other people to join in the challenge. Challenges can range from who can take the most steps in a set amount of time or who will be the first to reach a certain number of steps. The blog announcement says you can invite even those that aren’t on Samsung Health but didn’t include details on how that will work.
Samsung says that those who use the Challenge feature on the Samsung Health app actually walk 22% more than the average users. Before Group Challenge, there were other kinds that you can take on like Global Challenge where you can go up against other Samsung Health users from around the world. The 1:1 Challenge lets you invite one other person to compete with you. And now with the Group Challenge, you can get more people so you can help motivate and compete with each other.
Samsung says their Samsung Health app was used by more than 200 million in 2020 and they took around 78 trillion steps and burned 3 billion calories. Probably a lot of this was brought about by trying to keep healthy in the midst of a pandemic. Germany, Korea, Spain, the UK, and Russia were the five most active countries at least based on daily step count. The average daily step count in 2020 was 4,388 steps for general users and 5,488 for those who used Challenge features.
The Group Challenge feature on Samsung Health will start appearing on January 12. We’ve yet to see a major update to the app since 2018 so hopefully we’ll see one this year.