There is a scene that repeats itself with almost ritualistic regularity. An app promises something as simple as it is irresistible: walk, and we’ll pay you. The media gets excited, influencers go viral with it, downloads skyrocket for a few glorious weeks, and then, slowly and quietly, the app fades away until it vanishes from the radar. Sweatcoin, Evidation, Miles, Macadam, and the entire crypto generation led by STEPN share the same fate. It is neither coincidence nor bad luck: it is a model that, as soon as you look at it with a bit of skepticism, doesn't add up.
Phase 1: The Illusion of Explosive Growth
The cycle always starts the same way, and it’s worth describing because it follows the textbook to a tee. Behind it, there is venture capital willing to buy into the illusion of traction: PR agencies are hired to place sensationalist headlines ("the app that pays you to walk," "the phenomenon that gives away free coffee for exercising"), a hook that no tech outlet can resist because it guarantees clicks. In parallel, referral networks are activated: bonus points for every invited friend—the classic digital word-of-mouth mechanic that turns into the appearance of a viral surge on TikTok or Instagram in a matter of days.
And to make all this look credible, the company intentionally burns money. It gives away real gift cards, generous prizes, and promotions that lack any sustainable business logic because the goal isn't to make money yet: it’s to inflate download metrics to justify the next investment round. It is advertising disguised as generosity, funded by other people's money.
Phase 2: The Wall of Reality
The problem is that downloads are not the same as sustainability, and that gap comes at a heavy price. This is where the first wall appears, the most brutal of all: the math doesn't add up. The user reasonably believes that if they walk ten thousand steps a day, they will receive the equivalent of a lunch or a few dollars a week. The commercial reality is different: to an advertiser, a thousand steps are worth fractions of a cent. Accumulating enough for a five-dollar gift card can take between four to six months of uninterrupted walking. When the user does the math—and sooner or later, they do—the feeling isn't a minor disappointment, but of being scammed, giving rise to waves of one-star reviews.
To avoid bankruptcy, many of these platforms resort to what we could call deceptive rewards: instead of real prizes, they offer discount coupons for obscure brands, or free shipping contingent on spending fifty dollars at some bar. Users don't feel like they're earning money; they feel like they're being sold advertising disguised as a reward. To make matters worse, it's common for redemption costs to inflate over time: what cost five hundred points in the first month costs three thousand the next, or comes with new rules like validating your steps every day before midnight.
Compounding this is the U.S. context, which radically alters the cost-time equation. In an emerging economy, earning two or three dollars a month by walking might be a curious incentive. In the United States, where the hourly wage is much higher, collecting a couple of dollars after months of effort doesn't offset the space the app takes up on the phone nor the battery it drains. On top of that, these apps compete against already established loyalty programs—Starbucks, Chipotle, McDonald's—which give away free food much faster simply for spending money, without requiring ten thousand steps or any intermediaries.
Fraud, Surveillance, and Invisible Burnout
Unsurprisingly, the system was exploited almost immediately: people tying phones to automatic rocking chairs, ceiling fans, or spoofing GPS locations. Companies responded with increasingly strict anti-cheat algorithms, which ended up invalidating real steps from people who went out for a run or trained on a treadmill. The outcome is predictable: genuine frustration, one-star reviews, and the feeling that the app punishes the honest user while chasing ghosts.
Then there is the data issue. As the American public became more conscious of digital privacy, an uncomfortable question emerged: what is the real business here? The answer, almost always, is the collection and sale of geolocation, movement, and health data. Many users uninstall the app the moment they realize they are trading their location for insignificant rewards.
There is also a more subtle, almost psychological burnout that is rarely mentioned, but weighs just as heavily as the others. The gamification of levels, badges, and rankings works in video games because there is narrative and community behind them; in a step-tracking app, it quickly becomes empty noise—a hollow shell the user detects right away. Added to this is the cognitive fatigue of having to open the app, validate steps, check redemptions, and deal with rules that change monthly: a mental load that directly contradicts the simplicity that anything tied to health should have. Even deeper is a misalignment of motivations: walking or running is usually tied to intrinsic goals—health, discipline, well-being—and by introducing a minimal financial incentive, the app shifts that motivation toward the extrinsic. When the reward falls short of compensating for the effort, the activity loses its inherent meaning, and the user abandons not just the app, but sometimes the habit itself.
The Underlying Problem: Nobody Has Skin in the Game
If you want to get to the core of the matter, the failure of this model isn't just one of execution, but of design. The business relies on a constant stream of sponsors willing to pay for other people's steps, and in a saturated market, brands prefer to invest in direct advertising or their own loyalty programs. That leaves Move-to-Earn apps in an awkward limbo: neither as attractive as loyalty apps from major chains, nor as sustainable as a corporate program with its own budget.
Crypto versions pushed this logic to its most explicit extreme. Platforms like STEPN, built on Web3 models where you had to buy "digital shoes" as NFTs to start earning cryptocurrency by walking, collapsed because at their core they were Ponzi schemes: rewards for older users were paid with the money brought in by new users buying NFTs. The moment fresh blood stopped entering, the internal economy crumbled within weeks. Nobody in that setup had anything to lose if the system failed—except the last person to join.
And that is where the single exception that actually works appears, almost as a counterproof: programs built into corporate wellness initiatives or health insurance plans, where an insurer discounts part of the premium or gifts a smartwatch if the employee meets audited step goals. The difference isn't in marketing or product design; it's that someone actually has skin in the game. The insurer has a real financial incentive—reducing its own medical costs—to sustain the reward over time. It isn't buying downloads with investor money; it’s paying for a result that directly benefits its bottom line.
The Silent Death
When the marketing tap is turned off and real prizes turn into useless coupons, the app loses its viral momentum almost immediately. Users stop recommending it, influencers migrate to the next shiny object, and the media stops covering it. Brands that initially gave away samples or discounts to try their luck notice that users only show up once to hunt for the reward and never become real customers, so they jump ship. Churn rates often exceed ninety percent after just a few months.
The company doesn't usually go bankrupt overnight. Often, the app lives on in a zombie state on app stores, showing intrusive ads to a handful of oblivious users until the developers eventually shut down the servers or sell it to a data aggregator that will squeeze out the last remaining value.
What is interesting—and what draws my attention most about this phenomenon—is that the failure isn't an isolated accident, but a statistical regularity: each new wave of one-star reviews eventually taints the entire category, even the few platforms trying to do things right. The problem, then, isn't just economic. It is also psychological, cultural, and structural: a model doomed to be marginal or short-lived, except in specific contexts where there is a real institutional incentive behind it—an insurer, a company, a government—willing to put something genuine on the table. A government? Only to a degree. A government (or occasionally an institution like a company or NGO) is a point worth refining because it hits right at the Talebian core of this skeptical view. A private insurer (when unsubsidized) has genuine skin in the game: it pays with its own capital, and if its math is wrong, it suffers the loss. A government (or certain institutions) funding such a program does so with third-party money—taxpayers' money—so the official deciding on the program risks nothing of their own if it fails. It is precisely the asymmetry Taleb attacks in Skin in the Game: the decision-maker doesn't bear the cost of the mistake. In all other cases, what is sold as a wellness revolution ends up being merely another, more sophisticated way to buy your attention with the promise of a coffee that almost never arrives.
Links
https://www.chopdawg.com/why-most-apps-fail-and-what-the-successful-ones-do-differently/
https://www.vaasblock.com/crypto/move-to-earn-projects/
https://www.fitcoin.co/articles/sweatcoin-vs-macadam
https://www.vaasblock.com/crypto/move-to-earn-projects
Content created with AI technological support.
