Plain and Simple Health

Your iPhone has been quietly recording your health for years. This app makes it easy to look at.

Apple keeps a great deal on your phone and then makes it awkward to read — there is no Home Screen widget for Health data, and no step complication. A whole category of paid apps exists to sell those gaps back to you: widgets, trend lines, history beyond thirty days, and exporting your own numbers. None of it is expensive to build, and all of it is data you already own. So it is free here, and it always will be.

WHAT IT SHOWS • A Today screen with Recovery, Sleep and Exertion, and a board of metrics you arrange yourself • Thirty-six metrics — steps, sleep, heart rate, workouts, body measurements and the rest • Charts with sparklines rather than a wall of figures • Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets and a Control Centre tile • Your history as far back as Health holds it, not the last thirty days

IT EXPLAINS ITSELF Some figures come with a verdict, and one is set against a published national reference table. Every one of them has a screen showing exactly how it was worked out, so you are able to disagree with it. Nothing here is a black box.

A GRADE FOR WHAT IS IN THE PACKET Scan a barcode and it grades the product out of 100 and lists what is in it. Two and a half million products ship inside the app, built from USDA's public-domain FoodData Central and from Open Food Facts — so scanning works on a plane, and nothing about what you scanned is ever looked up anywhere. You can search by name too.

BEFORE AN APPOINTMENT It gathers a short page of things worth mentioning, drawn from your own history, and will make a PDF of it you can hand over.

TAKE IT WITH YOU Export any metric over any range — CSV for a spreadsheet, JSON Lines for a script.

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO • No adverts, no purchases, no subscription • No account, no analytics, no tracking of any kind • No network requests at all. There is no networking code in the project, and a test fails the build if any ever appears • It writes back exactly one thing: the food you type in. Nothing it calculates is ever written to Health

It reads your date of birth and your biological sex, because the reference table is tabulated by both. It stores neither, and neither goes anywhere.

If you have never worn a watch or carried the phone about, there is nothing yet for this to show — and it will say so plainly rather than draw you an empty chart.