App Profile: Hydrow

balloondogspop

Rating: 4/5

First and foremost, this app is fantastic. There are hundreds of options ranging from a beginner “Learn How To Row” series to advanced series designed to push you to new PRs. The fitness instructors are all high-energy, friendly, and knowledgeable as well as diverse in gender, body type, and background. As I mentioned before, there are hundreds of classes and it seems like Hydrow will continue to add to their already impressive library. My only criticism (and the reason I docked the app a star) is that there are no search or filter options. I’d love to be able to find way classes by time, location, class type, class level, max stroke rate, etc. As I am a n00b, I am mostly interested in 20-minute beginner classes with a 28 max stroke rate. Hydrow has tons of these classes; however, I have to spend a good 5-10 minutes scrolling scrolling scrolling to find them. Hopefully, this will be fixed soon in a future update.

Speck378

Rating: 3/5

This review is written by someone who doesn’t own a Hydrow but spends $20 a month on the classes through the app for use with my water rower. Many hydrow classes are great - that is where my 3 stars come from, but the app isn’t polished and is frustrating to use during a workout. It doesn’t have native streaming to a television. It’s possible to mirror through an Apple TV but that does t work reliably. There’s also no way to filter classes, forcing you to scroll through all classes to find what you’re looking for. There are no options for on screen metrics like instructor stroke rate or elapsed time. Most frustrating, if you do want to touch the screen to pause or check elapsed time, the class will often just end and ask how you to rate the class. Forcing you to restart and scroll to where you were. Hydrow needs to study the peloton app which is a perfect example of good app design and functionality. Peloton has a small button that says end workout and that doesn’t come up until you’ve touched the screen. Please Hydrow - add filtering , screen casting and make it more difficult to end a workout.

zesty exuberance

Rating: 1/5

Removing 2 stars from my previous review since the app no longer shows video at full res on iPad. Guys, this is Mickey Mouse functionality here. If your app isn’t capable of dealing with screen orientation, compile separate versions for portrait iPhone and landscape iPad. Now I see either a cropped portrait mode video or a half-res or smaller landscape mode video that doesn’t fill the screen. I’m still paying $20 a month for a broken app that doesn’t integrate with other devices like every other app at this price point? Not much longer. Do better or I’m out the door like my friends who used to subscribe. Being taken for granted by developers is not motivating. Previous: I love the workouts, and rowing among with the instructors on the water is spectacularly motivating. But there's absolutely ZIP ZERO NADA integration with other equipment like my water rower, and you don't even allow users to enter their stats after a workout for personal tracking. For $20 a month that's a baseline function. Even Peloton lets you use other bikes in their classes, and for only a bit over half your monthly fee.