ASICS

More and more if you want to taken seriously in the fitness apparel space you need an app. Nike has been developing apps in-house for years, Under Armour purchased MapMyFitness, MyFitnessPal, and Endomondo, and Adidas acquired Runtastic. Wanting to keep up with the competition, Asics has snapped up one of the largest remaining fitness apps, Runkeeper. Runkeeper is a veteran iOS app, having been among the first apps in the App Store when the store launched in 2008. While Asics already has a decent (and well liked) app with MY ASICS, it has failed to create the passion, community, and popularity that Runkeeper has. To illustrate this, MY ASICS has approximately 600 reviews on the App Store while Runkeeper has nearly 45,000 reviews and boasts a user base of over 45 million! The acquisition is estimated to be valued at $85 million. Runkeeper founder Jason Jacobs took to Medium to announce the news and stated that app will continue to exist and be developed. For the end-user he expects very little difference except improved resources to allow developers to be bring things to bear that would not have been possible otherwise.