Hobby Apps Are The New Social Media
Consumers are tracking every element of their lives, and making friends through it.
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Wellness is increasingly a social proposition – and extends far beyond BPM. Hiking, calisthenics, nutrition events, birding, wild swimming, and community saunas are all gaining ground as activities combining health, exercise, and the ability to meet new and likeminded people.
Concurrently, a wide-ranging set of tracking apps are establishing themselves as communicative spaces, representing an alternative for many users turned off by traditional social media platforms’ degraded experience.
Indeed, the share of people who report using social platforms to (i) stay in touch with friends, (ii) express themselves or (iii) meet new people has fallen by over 25% since 2014, as the Financial Times reported in October.
Young people are the most engaged cohort in this cultural shift. They are already the key demographic driving the gym membership boom. But they’re seeking more than physical health. A striking 55% rank mental health as one of their top three reasons for exercising. Critically, 44% consider exercise expenditure their first or second spending priority, according to a study from the Gym Group.
However, “we hit post-pandemic run club mania,” says Sportsverse author Daniel-Yaw Miller. While brands across industries jumped on run clubs, more buoyant and less over-exposed activities are emerging where brand activations and campaigns could foster significant engagement and positive sentiment amongst customer cohorts.
Accountability is Fun Now
For customers accustomed to step-counts and sleep scores, does anything really happen if the data doesn’t exist to prove it? Today, public accountability is an aspirational experience. Wall Street CEOs are posting their marathon times “as status symbols”, reports Bloomberg. Letterboxd, a cinephile-app enabling users to track what they watch and what they think of it, garners 2.4 billion monthly views.
But it is apps with maximal social potential that really matter, like Bumble’s newly relaunched Bumble BFF, and TimeLeft, which organises “dinner parties with strangers”. As the World Health Organisation says, “social isolation and loneliness are widespread, with one in six experiencing loneliness worldwide”.
Tracking-apps are another emerging antidote to isolation. Strava is not just for running. The app has nearly 40 million active monthly users. In the UK, under 30s cycling accounts jumped 80% last year. Hiking, swimming, indoor activities — Strava users are 218% more likely to buy products to access communities, as per a “Business Report,” shared by the company. Critically, the app diminishes social inhibition and enables like-minded individuals to connect in a low pressure manner.
The iNaturalist, a social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing finds in nature, has a community of 4 million observers across the world, who have logged over 250 million observations. The Washington Post reports: “iNat users hold tens of thousands of in-person bioblitzes a year — forging countless friendships, as well as iNat couples and an iNat wedding.”
Tracking can be applied to every activity imaginable. Flo, a period-tracking app, is used by teenagers for a very different kind of flex: “when you have sex you click the little heart icon to track if ur pregnant etc”.
In China, ( 打卡) “Daka” culture (“punching the card” in order to flex on Xiaohongshu) is more communal than Instagram dumps. By visiting specific locations, uploading imagery to document attendance and experiences, community is created across networks, unlike Instagram’s sporadic self-driven content. Equally, in the West, this learned behaviour is unlikely to change in the near future. Gen Z grew up on Snap Maps, sharing their location and tracking the locations of their networks.
“Because hobby apps are nicer places to exist, people spend more time on them [than traditional social media apps],” reported The Guardian earlier this year.
Gen Z, particularly, views wellness as an opportunity to make friends. More than half of Gen Z athletes name social connection as their top reason for joining a fitness group, and they are also 29% more likely than Millennials to work out with another person, according to data from Strava.
Tracking apps and wearable devices with in-built apps open up exactly this kind of interest-based social opportunity. The ability to connect with others on Strava is now a key usage benefit. As Steve Knopper shared in the New York Times earlier this week: “The more I ran, the more inspiration I found in following strangers – like Greg, a Ukrainian runner braving the threat of Russian bombs, and Keira, an elite Utah marathoner racing around the world.”
Strava’s main feed, clubs, monthly or yearly challenges, ability to send ‘kudos’ to celebrate a friend’s fitness achievements, and messaging features have made the app a source of platonic, and even romantic, connection. For brands, this matters. Strava users are 194% more likely to be in the top socio-economic segment and 48% more likely to be high net-worth individuals.
For Gen Z, wellness is now as much a form of self-protection as it is a way to stay physically healthy. This is a significant generational reframing of a core activity. Functional nutrition (like TikTok’s “eat your skincare” trend), using app-blockers, making new friends, and exploring a ‘sober-curious’ lifestyle all now come under the wellness bracket.
“The conversation is more about preventing stress and trauma, and learning how to cope with things so your body, your nervous system doesn’t freeze up,” a 25-year-old Matter Community member told Matter.
Oura, the bio-tracking ring, has introduced Oura Circles, private groups in which members (up to 20) can share and react to data on each other’s sleep and activity scores.
And dedicated social wellness clubs are launching worldwide, including a new venture ‘432’ in Amsterdam, aimed at 25-to-40-year-olds “who want to meet friends and have social experiences that don’t revolve around alcohol”.
For brands, the opportunity to serve a burgeoning, vocal, and interested community is emerging. Not every brand is well-suited to engaging sport or exercise as a vertical, but the expansion of wellness and its importance in young consumers’ lifestyles is an opportunity to genuinely connect with consumers’ increasing health anxieties – particularly those which surround social and community events.
Everyone’s Hormonal Now
Some metrics are becoming as culturally significant as they are medically. Hormone tracking is garnering momentum in conversations across the gender divide — Bryan Johnson, who invests $2 million a year in his infamous quest for longevity, claims to use hormone therapy, while “testosterone boosting” is a common practice amongst manosphere influencers.
But the trend also reflects a broader curiosity about hormonal health among Gen Z,” as Vogue Business reports. Videos on TikTok tagged #lutealphase have garnered over 85.4 million views, with, as Dazed reports, “a lot of people, especially young women and girls, describing the luteal phase as [making them feel] “ugly” because of mood swings and irritability, acne flare-ups and bloating”. “I just look at the calendar and it all makes sense,” one popular creator on the platform said of tracking her menstrual cycle.
Oura’s demographics attest to the opportunity. “Our fastest-growing customer segment [is] Gen Zs between 18 and 25 years old, [and] sales among women grew 250% in the last year, while men’s sales grew 75%,” CEO Tom Hale told Vogue Business earlier this month.
The app and device offer period predictions, fertility tracking, pregnancy insights, menstrual cycle tracking, and a built-in AI assistant which “uses the ring’s data to make predictions of where the wearer is in their cycle, as well as suggestions for why the wearer may be more fatigued than usual, or the type of exercise they should engage in during that phase”.
The woman’s wellness space is buoyant, but under-served, and much of it is also under-informed. The global women’s health market size was estimated at $49.33 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $68.53 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 5.1%. Women account for two-thirds of wellness guests yet, until recently, have received little focused care, with just 5% of health research funding allocated to them, as the LA Times reported recently.
As the ongoing TikTok discourse would suggest, these conversations around wellness are inherently social in nature. Offline, cycle-synced workout classes are now being offered by studios like Gymbox, while, away from exercise, women’s groups are emerging as a safe space.
Brand Presence in Present Spaces
“I’ve noticed more and more, from being interested in wellness, women’s circles as a place to come together and share,” Florence Wales Bonner, creative director and brand consultant, tells Matter. “It’s basically a group of women who don’t necessarily know each other at all. They come together, sit in a circle, and say how they feel. It’s about the therapeutic benefits of sharing with people.”
Women-focused wellness resorts are gaining momentum: Canyon Ranch’s $500 million resort in Austin, Texas is scheduled to open next year, tackling “physiological issues such as menopause”, while Six Senses has launched a women’s wellness initiative at five of its resorts, also focusing on hormonal health and cycle support. The Six Senses programme involves wearing a glucose monitor and a sleep tracker.
For brands, these spaces and movements undoubtedly represent and serve the desires of a significant and highly-engaged cohort, where biotracking has become a way to control an otherwise out-of-control world, alleviate health anxiety, and socialise and connect with others. However, they are not without a toxic fringe. The eating disorder charity BEAT warns that fitness tracking features can lead to obsessive tendencies, as per the BBC.
Brands should seek to identify cultural experiences that benefit both attendees and the culture itself, leaving communities better than they found them.
Steve Dool, senior director, brand and creative at Depop told Matter: “When you’re talking about cultural relevance, it involves an invitation. Someone is inviting your brand into their space, community, gathering, niche, whatever.”
While a partnership with, for illustration purposes, Strava, is beyond the budgets of some brands, costs are nonetheless competitive when compared to many paid strategies and traditional advertising investments (with a minimum investment level of $30-50k). Far less rational investments continue to be made in less structural cultural shifts.
This requires signalling an adequate and respectful enough understanding of subcultures and real-lifestyles, to earn yourself an organic invitation into the channels and chats that matter, to achieve brand objectives within them. “Identify opportunities that drive word of mouth, built for long-term brand health,” he says.
That’s because social media is no longer social or media, it’s just advertising.
Please don’t kill me: but omg someone actually ran Frida Kahlo on Strava that is insane