GoJoe includes 40 activity types. At present, we don’t distinguish between a ‘hike’ on the one hand and a ‘walk’/'run' on the other and, in any event, you could do the former without any increased gradient. Needless to say, step challenge apps don’t measure gradient and also exclude lots of other activities/metrics.
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We totally get it though that walking or running activities which include elevation gain will generally require more effort than those which do not. We do plan to introduce elevation into the points calculation and have started some early testing with focus groups. What we have found so far is that quite a few participants complain that it made the scoring overly complex and some wearables didn’t send elevation data which made life particularly unfair and spoilt the experience for them.
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Ultimately GoJoe is a bit of friendly social competition which is all about encouraging each other to get active and so we ultimately air on the side of simplicity and inclusion. We do, however, accept the elevation point (which we think is valid and fair) and we shall continue to build out the sophistication of the challenges, including as more wearables get better at sending more data.