Apple / health_and_fitness / PELOTON: FITNESS & WORKOUTS
REVIEW
Peloton's app is finally the product the bike used to be.
Stripped of the $2,500 hardware tether, the app-only tier is a credible standalone fitness studio — if you can stomach the subscription stack.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Peloton: Fitness & Workouts
PELOTON INTERACTIVE, INC.
OUR SCORE
7.4
APPLE
★ 4.9
PRICE
Free
Peloton spent ten years convincing the world that fitness needed a $2,500 piece of furniture to be worth doing. The app-only tier — quietly the company’s growth story since 2023 — is the admission that the furniture was never the point. The instructors were the point. The programming was the point. The library was the point.
What’s left, once you take the hardware out, is a credible standalone fitness studio that runs on whatever phone is already in your pocket. The bike’s still for sale, but the app is finally the product the bike used to be.
The instructors are still the moat — nobody else on the App Store has a bench this deep.
FEATURES
The app splits into two paid tiers. App One at $12.99 a month gives you three classes per week across cycling, running, strength, yoga, meditation, and outdoor audio. App+ at $24 a month removes the cap and unlocks the full on-demand and live library — thousands of classes, every discipline, no hardware required. A 30-day free trial covers App+.
Class playback is the part Peloton has spent a decade polishing. Filters cover instructor, duration, music genre, class type, and difficulty, and a "Stacks" feature lets you queue several classes back-to-back without thumbing through menus mid-workout. Strava integration, rebuilt in 2025, now pushes completed sessions over with class title, instructor, and discipline tagged, instead of the generic "Workout" entry it used to leave behind. Apple Watch tracking and Health export are both first-class.
Programs — multi-week structured plans, usually four to twelve weeks — are the most underrated feature in the app. Pick "Strength Roadmap" or "Power Zone Pace" and the app schedules the next class for you each session.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The instructors are still the moat. Nobody else on the App Store has a bench this deep — Robin Arzón for high-intensity, Ally Love for cardio, Adrian Williams for strength, Sam Yo for yoga that doesn't apologise for itself. The production is television-grade: real studios, real mixing, real camerawork. A 20-minute class with Cody Rigsby feels closer to a Netflix special than a fitness video.
The unbundling matters too. For most of the company's history, the app was an accessory you got because you bought the bike. The app-only tiers — introduced in 2023 and refined under new CEO Peter Stern through 2024 and 2025 — finally treat phone-and-mat users as a first-class audience, with running, strength, and outdoor classes that don't constantly nudge you toward hardware you don't own.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The pricing tier is genuinely confusing. App One's three-classes-per-week cap is the kind of artificial constraint that exists to push you to App+ at nearly double the price, and the difference between the two tiers is buried in the upgrade screen rather than spelled out anywhere obvious.
Peloton itself is still working through the post-2021 hangover — the company has lost money for fourteen straight quarters as of early 2026, and the app has shipped fewer new programs and instructor signings than during the peak years. Live class slots aren't what they were in 2021, and the strength-class video framing still assumes you have more living-room space than most New York apartments allow. The Android app continues to lag the iOS one on Strava sync reliability and Apple Watch parity, which matters if you share a household across platforms.
CONCLUSION
If you'll actually use more than three classes a week, App+ at $24 is the fair price for what's still the best instructor-led class library on any phone. If you won't, skip the cheaper App One tier entirely — three classes weekly is hard to build a habit on, and the upgrade nag is constant. Watch what Stern's team ships in the back half of 2026: a clean tier consolidation would lift this app from solid to essential.