Inspiration
Fitness apps are great at tracking what you've already done — steps, workouts, calories, streaks — but tracking alone doesn't always create motivation.
Starting a workout can be difficult, staying consistent is even harder, and exercising alone can quickly become boring.
We wanted to explore a different question: what if your progress actually felt alive?
That idea became Movo.
What it does
Movo is a social fitness app where real movement helps raise and evolve a virtual companion.
Users complete workouts to earn points, progress through evolution stages, and unlock new ways to customize their Movo. Instead of progress existing only as numbers and graphs, Movo turns it into something visual that grows alongside the user.
Users can:
- Log individual exercises
- Complete timed sessions with reps, holds and stretches
- Earn points through real activity
- Progress through Movo evolution stages
- Unlock and equip cosmetics
- Personalize themes and accent colors
- Interact with a prototype crew feed
- Participate in Movo Drops and live-session experiences
- View a prototype health dashboard
The social side of Movo is designed around accountability rather than competition. Friends can encourage each other to move without fitness becoming another leaderboard to win.
How we built it
Movo was built as a native iOS application using Swift and SwiftUI.
We used Combine to connect observable application state to the SwiftUI interface, allowing changes such as workout completion, points, progression, and customization to update the UI.
For the hackathon MVP, application data is persisted locally using UserDefaults with encoded data models. This allowed us to build and demonstrate the complete core progression experience without requiring a production backend.
The app includes logic for workout scoring, timed sessions, point-based progression, Movo evolution, customization unlocks, onboarding, settings, workout history, and local persistence.
The crew experience is currently an interactive prototype using locally simulated activity. The health dashboard also uses sample data in the MVP, with Apple Health / Google Fit integration planned for a future version.
Challenges we ran into
One of our biggest challenges was deciding how much of the larger Movo concept we could turn into a coherent MVP within the hackathon timeframe.
Movo combines fitness tracking, progression, character evolution, customization, social interaction and health data. Instead of trying to build production infrastructure for every feature, we focused on making the core movement-to-progression loop functional while prototyping the larger social and health experience.
We also had to design a scoring system that could reward different types of movement, including repetitions, timed holds and mobility exercises, without treating every activity identically.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud that Movo became more than a static UI concept.
The MVP has a functioning workout and timed-session system, point-based progression, multiple evolution stages, customization unlocks, onboarding, personalization and persistent local state.
Most importantly, the different features work around one central idea: your real movement causes something inside Movo to grow.
What we learned
Building Movo taught us how quickly product scope grows when an idea combines multiple systems.
We learned to distinguish between what needed to be genuinely functional for the MVP and what could be prototyped to communicate the larger product vision.
We also gained experience building a native SwiftUI application, managing shared application state, persisting data locally, and designing multiple features around a single progression system.
What's next for Movo
The next major step would be turning the social prototype into a real networked experience with user accounts, real-time crew syncing and shared workout sessions.
We would also like to integrate Apple Health and Google Fit, expand the workout library, complete the artwork and animations for every Movo evolution stage, and improve language support and accessibility.
Our goal is simple:
Move together. Grow together.
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