Reporter Is a Godsend for Those Who Want to Measure Their Days Via Smartphone

For better or for worse, the devices we carry are now capable of tracking us more closely than ever: charting our movement, our location and our activities, all from our pocket.

With these new capabilities in mind, former Facebook designer and engineer Nicholas Felton has created a private and hyperconscious app called Reporter, which tracks your activity and gives you insight into how you live your everyday life.

Released Thursday, Reporter is an iPhone app that registers the most minute details of your life in two ways: first, by employing the many technological and tracking capabilities built into the iPhone 5s and, second, by prompting you to answer a series of questions about what you’re doing, several times a day.

The result, if you’re persistent, is the ability to measure and evaluate your relationships, priorities, happiness and health over time based on each day’s circumstances.

Every time you decide to file a report, the app will also collect a few snippets about your environment: the weather, the noise level around you, how many steps you’ve taken and the number of photos you’ve snapped that day. Obviously, a lot of that stuff uses the gadgetry built into the newest iPhone — especially the motion-tracking M7 chip, which Apple introduced in the iPhone this year, and which makes it much easier for the iPhone to track your specific movements.

Felton — who designed some of Facebook’s most infamous life-profiling features, like Timeline and Graphs — told The Verge he learned a lot when he dedicated 79 hours to collecting data about himself in 2012. Felton was able to see who he was spending time with the most, when he was most productive and how much time he spent sleeping (32 percent of his time), among many other things.

The data from Reporter is stored locally on your phone, but you can export it anytime to Dropbox or as a CSV or JSON file (files used to store basic database information in a simple format). Of course, normal people won’t have the tools or wherewithal to do anything with that information, so Felton is hoping other developers will create user-friendly software to make it easier.

Though it might sound like a lot of self-important navel-gazing, the $3.99 app is an interesting experiment in the realm of self-help. It could, at the very least, be an inexpensive alternative to diet trackers or other, less comprehensive, productivity apps.

Here’s a quick primer on how to use it:

1. Download it here.

2. Open the app.

3. You’ll be shown a short introductory message that explains the app and encourages you to “embrace your sensors.”

4. This four-panel intro is likely meant to ease you into allowing the access this app needs to your phone’s tracking systems. Let’s run through them, shall we?

First up: your photos. Reporter won’t necessarily store your actual photos; it’ll just track how many you’ve taken between updates.

Next up: your contacts. The app won’t reach out to your friends or spam them. It just needs this information for auto-fill purposes when it asks who you’re spending time with.

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a request to access your microphone. I know what you’re thinking: An app that’s constantly recording sound will zap your battery. But Reporter uses it more like a brief check-in, whenever you’ve decided to report your activity, to monitor the noise level around you.

It’ll also want to access your motion activity, which is measured by your iPhone 5s’s M7 motion co-processor. This is so you can track the number of steps you’ve taken.

5. Once you’ve given the app permission to be all up in your business, you’ll be brought to a home screen of your first “report.” As you can see below, the app automatically ticks off some basic information: location, weather, photos you’ve taken today, the level of noise around you, and how much you’ve moved. Below that is the start of a quick, auto-generated survey to see how your day is going.

The prompts require a variety of different answers. Some want you to enter a number, to select your exact location, to type in the people you’re hanging out with, or just to offer a simple yes/no.

6. Once you’ve finished your first report, you’ll be brought to your home screen. From there you can access old reports by tapping on the upper-left menu icon, adjust your settings and answer questions through the toolbar in the upper-right corner, tell Reporter you’re going to sleep so it leaves you alone, or report again.

7. Tap the tool icon. From there you’ll be brought to a dashboard where you can control the app’s many moving parts. Adjust the number of push notifications that encourage you to file a report, answer more questions, shut off the access your app has to your phone, export your data, or change up the background colors.

8. To customize your survey, tap Questions. From there you’ll be shown everything that’s included in your survey thus far, and how many times you’ve answered each inquiry. Tap Add a Question… at the bottom of the screen.

9. Enter your question and then, under Type, choose the way you want to answer it. Options range from Yes/No to entering in names or numbers. You can schedule when you’d like to be asked the question and how you’d like the resulting data to be visualized on your screen later. When you’re all done, tap Create.

10. That question has been added to your lineup. As you continue to log your activity, you’ll see the data for your past answers beneath each prompt. (Now when my editor asks if I’m actually working, I’ll just send him this graphic. Take that, Jason.)

And that’s the gist of it. Reporter is an app that requires a large amount of attention. Whether it’s right for you comes down the the most age-old question of tech: Is it worth it to sacrifice a few minutes of your life each day to track your existence in a larger context?

I know, man, deep. You can try out Reporter for $4 here.

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