A fitness company buys a popular app for several hundred million dollars. Five years later it sells the same app for a hundred million less than it paid. The press release calls this sharpening the brand.
Somewhere in the middle of that round trip is you, and however many years of meals, runs and weigh-ins you logged. The press release does not mention you. But you came with the building.
A short, unhappy pattern
In 2015 Under Armour bought MyFitnessPal for about $475 million. The plan was ambitious: fold it together with two other trackers it had acquired and build a single connected-fitness empire. In 2020 it sold MyFitnessPal to Francisco Partners, a private equity firm, for $345 million — roughly $130 million less than it paid.
The same day, Under Armour announced it would shut down Endomondo, another tracker it had bought in 2015, by the end of the year. People who had been logging runs in Endomondo for a decade had a few weeks to export their history, if they read the email.
So in a single year, one company sold one tracking app to a private equity firm at a loss and switched another off. None of this was unusual. Runkeeper went to ASICS. Apps move between owners the way furniture moves between flats — the icon stays the same, the thing behind it changes hands completely.
You came with the building
When an app is acquired, the headline number is mostly about you. The code isn't the asset; code is cheap and ages badly. The asset is the accounts — millions of them — and the years of records attached to each one. That is the thing being valued at $345 million.
Which means when ownership changes, the new owner inherits your data and, more to the point, the right to set new terms for it. The privacy policy you agreed to was a deal with a company that, in any meaningful sense, no longer exists. The new owner writes a new policy. You will get an email about it. You will probably not read the email, and the email is written by people who know that.
It is worth saying that none of this requires bad intent. A private equity firm buying a database of health records is not a villain. It is doing the ordinary thing, which is looking for value in an asset it paid for. The data is the asset. You are inside the data.
You didn't sign up with the company that holds your records today. You signed up with whoever they sold it to, on terms written after the fact.
The shutdown is the quiet part
Acquisition is the loud event. Shutdown is the quiet one, and it is usually where the data actually goes.
When an app is retired, the company does the legally tidy thing. It announces a date. It offers an export. It deletes the rest. Endomondo gave its users until the end of 2020. In a narrow sense that is fair. But an export is a file you have to know to ask for, before a deadline you have to notice, in a format you then have to find a home for. Most people manage none of the three.
They find out the app is gone the day they reach for it. The icon is missing, or it opens something else, or it opens nothing. Ten years of routes — not stolen, not leaked, just not migrated. And that is the good outcome. The bad one is the 2018 MyFitnessPal breach, which exposed around 150 million accounts. A big database of personal records is valuable to the buyer, and valuable to everyone else too.
Where your records actually live
None of this is an argument against software made by companies. Companies build most of the good tools, and being acquired is a normal thing that happens to a normal business. It is an argument for being clear-eyed about one question: where do the records you care about actually live?
If they live on a server owned by a company, they live on an asset. Assets get bought, sold, refocused and wound down, and the sale does not ask your permission. Your eight years of data are a line item in someone else's deal.
A file on your own disk is not a line item. It has no quarterly target and no acquirer. When the company that made the tool gets bought or sold or quietly retired, the file on your laptop carries on exactly as it was — because it was never theirs to sell.
OneFileClub makes powerful one-file tools for keeping your own records — habit trackers, training logs, food diaries, sleep logs. One file. One payment. Nothing to acquire, nothing to retire. Your data stays on your device.