snoww: track your skiing Reviews

by Kimberly Nasief-Westergren

This has happened multiple times. 1000+ vertical off between this and my epic. 1000+ off between me and my partners distance-and we did all the same slopes.

I have snoww on my Iwatch3, and my iPhone 8+. Sometimes snoww will just stop. If it stops, all data is lost. If the watch or the phone dies, all data is lost. This is a problem, as phones and watch batteries will run out on the slope. I understand it doesn’t record after the battery dies, but why isn’t the data stored or backed up so that once the power comes back on, it resumes.

Sometimes runs that were completed just disappear. I did well over 4 hours of skiing one day, and it shows 2 runs (instead of the 10 that I did) and a fraction of the vertical covered. I’m going to SkiTracks.

by Oklahoman Trying His Best

So I went 81 MPH with a snowboard going downhill like a scared antelope running from a cheetah. Like a mouse running from an owl. Like a dog running to see it’s owner.. Such determination would have awarded me the Nobel Peace prize for going so fast and not killing anybody. Just an Oklahoman trying his best. The speed I accomplished would have put me in 1st place on the leaderboard and I would have beat the 2nd place contender by 2 MPH; not a massive margin. However, snoww is claiming that 81 MPH is too fast and will not allow for my max speed to be counted on the leaderboard.. it would be naive of me to think that I am the only one to exceed 79 mph, however with the top 4-5 people clocking in at 79 I find it hard to believe they haven’t tried for at least 80. I mean what’s 1 MPH when you’re already going 79 lol. In conclusion, I would like to be included in the leaderboard and not excluded for going too fast. Sincerely, The Oklahoman trying his best.

by Mayhannnah

this app is not consistently accurate with any of it’s metrics. I downloaded the watch app hoping it would be more accurate than the phone app, however, they seemed about the same. If you have it recording while on a chair lift or gondola, it will record that as a run occasionally, which is ridiculous because you are clearly going uphill. It also randomly doesn’t record and save runs to a session.

I love the idea of leaderboards and other fun features, however, they are filled with people getting to the top of the leaderboard with cheats like driving.

Overall, if you are at a mountain that has resort specific tracking capabilities like any Epic Mountain don’t waste your time with this app.

by Milesfunk

There are two big issues with it. One, it doesn’t write “active energy” to the apple health app but it does write “workouts”. What this means is that you will close your green exercise ring several times over but the activity app will basically read your day of skiing as a brisk walk. You may not close your pink move ring depending on what your daily goal is. Other workout apps do this and it’s great. this app calculates it and you can see your active calories in the health app but it doesn’t write it and it doesn’t count toward closing your ring.
The second issue is that it starts randomly. I’ll start snoww on my first ride up the mountain and frequently I already have a 23 hour session going. There isn’t a way to discard or cancel a session and so the quickest way is to kill snoww on your watch and your phone without closing the workout session and then start a new session from your phone. It’s a pain.
Other than those two issues, snoww is great.

by Alexander J. Bivolcic

The support structure and online presence of this developer are nearly non existent. snoww has gone for almost a year without an update. The few social media pages dedicated to snoww haven’t been updated since 2018. I’ve emailed the feedback email address and never received a reply.

Nevertheless, I will say snoww was designed beautifully and the various services still work. I really love the design and thought that went into it. However, the various stats, especially the speed tracker, are not as accurate as the competition. Also the weather system does not work at all. I have no faith that these issues will be fixed.

by Keith Snow Coffee

I went from a iPhone 6S to a iPhone 12 Pro, and skied a few times with snoww since I upgraded. I noticed it never uploaded any of my runs because everything in snoww stated “no internet connection found” despite having Wifi and 4G/5G. There was no help site, FAQs, bug submissions, or anything this company could do to help me out. snoww also has not been updated for almost a year.

My only solution to fix this was to delete snoww and redownload, but unfortunately this solution loses your offline data that has not been uploaded (so I lost a few runs from uploading). This would be the downfall of an app like Strava, so I’m surprised an issue like this appears in this app.

I’ll probably keep using it because it’s a free option to tracking runs and it works pretty well, but the lack of support for critical bugs where I lose data I tracked deserves 2 stars. Otherwise it’d be a solid 4

by KrisFoxSLO

I love the ski tracking and the report at the end of the day was really nice. The watch app even works okay, the first time. There has been an interesting decision on the watch app where it doesn’t respect your wrist orientation but rather orients itself based on how the watch is facing which meant at times I was looking at the report on the watch upside down until I turned my wrist to face me. I eventually uninstalled the watch app because it randomly started tracking during the day despite me not having launched snoww .

by OWoboros

snoww was just updated moments ago, but my review will stand for a bit.

“It’s been one helluva ride, but the ride stops here. The snow app was great, better in some ways than slopes, but it’s now long neglected. I’ve exported my data and, unless I see some kind of update for snoww, this is the end for me. I thank the developer for all the obvious hard work that went into creating snoww. It helped me set goal, ride harder and have more fun than ever before. I’d love to see the snow accumulation stats and the temperature stats fixed. I’d love to see the leaderboard filters to allow saving of filter settings, and I like to see the end of “follow this pro rider who doesn’t even use snoww ” messages. Let’s get rid of that altogether. Following pros is lame. Riding is what drives us. Anyway. Thanks. The last three years have been insane”

by Robby Delaware

There are two minor bugs with snoww.

First, during account creation, there is an input field for an email address. If the user enters in a valid email address, followed by a trailing white space, the user is not able to complete the account creation process. An error message appears that says “Sign up error” and that not all required fields have been entered. This message is misleading, and a trailing white space should either be auto-corrected, or there should be an error message indicating that something is not right with the entered email address.

The second problem is with the Siri Voice Commands and the shortcut that is added to Springboard. If the phone is locked, and the user then selects this app’s shortcut from SpringBoard, a misleading and confusing error message appears. If both of these problems could be fixed, that would be great. Thank you!

by Skioutwest

I use snoww with a ski group that I coordinate.

The features of snoww are excellent, however it is unreliable. I ran this along side a competing app and it missed 3 of my 15 runs while the other app didn’t. I also wish that the map feature allowed a satellite image overlay.

I am sure the developers are addressing this issue, as they seem pretty proactive regarding bug fixes. In fact, I see a new update today so we will see.

by Jsmithy7

snoww sells you hard on the leaderboard feature. The problem is leaderboards are skewed beyond repair by people leaving snoww on while they drive home. The top 10 high speeds at my resort are all from people driving home. Until I can ski as fast as a car on the freeway there is no point for me to “work my way up the leaderboards” or whatever garbage this app is promoting these days.
Other than that, snoww works great! It’s a lot of fun to look at all your runs and stats for the day.

by Mwyner

Honestly snoww is cool but it doesn’t seem to be super accurate. 2 of us using it on the same model of phone. Exact same runs, exact same time on mountain. Mileage between us was more than a mile off, vertical was more than 600 feet different. Apple Watch app also doesn’t work very well. Took over 10 minutes to find my location resort (ended up just running it on my phone since I assumed it wasn’t working), and even though I wasn’t using it on my watch, it took over my screen completely and watch refused to stay on main watch screen. this app constantly overrode it. Had to uninstall it from watch.

by Hjlucssj70

Great app design, easy to use and aesthetically pleasing. Tracks everything you want, and records it in snoww as well as adding calories burned to the Activity App. Pairs well with Apple Watch. Wish the run mileage was more precise, like the elevation change was, even to a tenth of a mile would be great. It would be interesting if in the statistics section you also included average speed, max distance, and max vertical to just be pleased by the statistics too!

by Drewbens

I've enjoyed tracking my skiing the last few days with snoww . It does a nice job and doesn't seem to drain the battery.

I'd suggest a few improvements:
1) More contrast in text. White and light blue/grey aren't easy to read when it's snowing!
2) More clear controls/buttons. It's really not obvious where to start/end your recording. Yeah, you can find it easily by playing around but skis and poles aren't clear. Nor is a mountain for where your sessions have been recorded.
3) Maps are great but held back by using Google, which doesn't have runs for all resorts and doesn't update the ones it has (and same for lifts). I know that's a google problem, but it filters through to snoww . At a minimum there should be a toggle for satelite images so you can see something more than blank space.

Anyway, I look forward to improvements and will keep this one on my phone.

by PlumLoopy

I tried a few apps before settling on this app. Besides the clean design, I really liked the social aspect and it was a great way to communicate with the rest of my family - see where they were on the mountain, etc.

Unfortunately, it appears the developer has walked away from it as there has not been an update in two years. I understand the pandemic threw a wrench into things but I’ll sadly have to explore other options. I just wish I could export all my data from the last four seasons.

So long, this app! You were great fun while it lasted!

by Li Jiaju

I’ve been using it for 3 ski seasons from the East Coast to the big mountains out West. It’s very accurate and loaded with great features like map, time on the slopes, altitude, number of runs and more. Also great info on runs from GPS, length of runs, max speed, average heart rate. I run it in tandem with my Apple Watch to get more than enough info. Also fun to upload photos as memories specific to the day and location. Highly recommend!

by Lgnmhn

I have been looking around and trying every ski/snowboard tracking app I can find on snoww Store or the internet, and I have come to the conclusion this app will eventually rise above the rest. It combines the social aspect with the statistical analysis aspect in a fun way that makes competing with your friends rewarding. I like the badges but I’d like somewhere on snoww to show all possible badges showing the ones you don’t have yet being grayed out, also along with a description on how any particular badge is earned.

by Noodles8

Love it. I ski at A-Basin and they are not part of vail resorts. I also ski at Keystone, which is part of Vail resorts. I use their app when there and love it . So I went looking for something that would work out of cell phone service (Verizon doesn’t work at A Bay).
This is wonderful! I haven’t tried the social part of snoww yet; but The tracking is excellent! Makes graphs and everything. Love analysis of the data in the car ride home! Thanks guys! Will use all times in future!

P.s. I hope snoww keeps up its excellence, so I can track my skiing as my body slides into senility... 😂😝😽

by Robmandu

Tracks your runs, distance, vertical feet, speed, and time on the slopes. Reports it all clearly. No annoying ads. It simply gets the job done.

Ran all day - 9 to 5 - on my iPhone 7 Plus and I was amazed to still have half my battery. For an app that relies on GPS, that’s amazing.

by Lcallinan

Help! Love snoww but with this latest update, snoww won’t stop running or taking over my watch (even after I try to kill it, it restarts automatically if snoww is open on my phone and I can’t do anything else). Only solutions is to uninstall from watch. I have an Apple Watch 3 with cellular.

by K8tri

It’s great when it works the first 2 times, but more 60% of time it simply doesn’t work. In the past 11 sessions, it has lost my session more than half of time. Either after session recorded won’t upload, or entire session just disappeared. Multiple times it just lost the session for no reason. Even after updated to latest version. And snoww drains Apple Watch battery like crazy. Multiple time it only record part of the run. This for running on iPhone X and Apple Watch 4.