No, THIS is the first app to take advantage of the iPhone 5s’ M7 coprocessor

Argus Motion Activity setting

Earlier today we ran a story about Strava Run, a fitness tracking app that tracks your runs and analyses your performances. Like many other media outlet, we believed Strava was the first app available in the App Store to take full advantage of the iPhone 5s new M7 coprocessor.

As it turns out, we were wrong. As many readers were quick to point out, Strava was not the first app available in the App Store to fully use the M7.

The first app to do bring Motion Activity M7 support to an app is Argus, an all around health and fitness tracker that has been been available for quite some time…

Looking at the version history, you can see that Argus was updated on September 20th with M7 support, while Strava Run was updated on September 24th.

I have to say I was a bit skeptical at first that Argus was able to get its update with M7 coprocessor support out the same day as the iPhone 5s launched worldwide. Why didn’t we hear about that before? And maybe more importantly, how were they able to get their app update out so quickly? That we might never find out.

Upon installing and launching the app though, it quickly asked me for access to the M7 Motion Activity feature, as you can see on the screenshot below.

Argus Motion Activity access

After authorizing Argus to use my Motion Activity data, the app quickly populated my “daily steps” for the last six days. This data, I believe, had been recorded by the M7 and was readily made available when I let Argus access it.

Argus splash page

Note that Argus was also updated minutes ago with better support for the M7, but at the time these screenshots were taken, I was still using the previous version that was released last Friday.

At the end of the day, it is not a big deal, but I find it a bit unfair to give a large amount of publicity to Strava when it’s actually not the first app to use the M7 coprocessor. If anything, Argus should have communicated better by sending out press releases last Friday. This would have avoided having their show stolen by an app that actually wasn’t first.

Both Argus and Strava are free on the App Store. But yes, Argus was first!