The majority of all tracking solutions have been nothing more than a stopgap before the hardware in smartphones could actually handle passive tracking in terms of battery life and data bandwidth. Navigation, local discovery, fitness tracking, retail, task crowdsourcing, and social networking are all going to be drastically changed by passive tracking capabilities being added to the core of smartphones.

Many of these industries have already been disrupted by non-passive tracking. I’m defining non-passive tracking as any solution that requires the user to take action and initiate tracking at the moment they need utility from the tracking app. The current fitness activity tracking apps are a great example of this. Before going for a run, you need to launch the app and click start to initiate the tracking.

What seems like a minor action by the user actually has much larger implications in creating additional user value. During the day you may quickly decides to take the stairs over the elevator, or walk a half mile to a new lunch spot. Those actions may not be recorded by the user and thus never tracked. This seemingly simple aspect of activity tracking has created a huge opportunity for independent passive tracking devices such as Fitbit, Jawbone Up, and others companies who focus purely on building separate passive fitness tracking devices that can handle the battery life that smartphones historically cannot. It is an important distinction as this industry battles to innovate and provide the most value to their users.

When smartphone’s can passively track, things are going to change. The launch of Google’s new Location APIsand Apple’s CoreMotion API allow these devices to passively track users’ location and activities without a lot of battery drain. You soon won’t need a separate passive tracking device to track your fitness activities as the smartphone you already own can now provide this feature.

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