Facebook buys fitness tracker startup behind Moves

New York: Facebook acquired the startup behind the popular fitness tracking app Moves as it expands beyond its namesake service into a company with multiple, differentiated mobile apps. The world’s largest online social network will keep running the service separately. Menlo Park, California-based Facebook said Thursday it bought ProtoGeo Oy, the Finnish company behind the app, for an undisclosed sum. Launched in 2013, the Moves app has been downloaded 4 million times on Android phones and the iPhone. It lets people automatically track their runs, walks or bike rides and plots the user’s routes on a map. To move beyond its core service, Facebook is developing and acquiring different kinds of apps. This year, it announced a $19 billion (Dh69.7 billion) deal for mobile messaging service WhatsApp and launched the news reader app Paper.