How it works

1. 01

   Open a plate

   A sitting rather than an entry, because that is what a meal is. Everything you had goes on the same plate, and the plate goes in once.

2. 02

   Point the camera, or just say it

   Scan the barcode and the figures come off the label, not out of somebody’s estimate. Or say “I ate 100g of chicken breast” — read on the phone, by Apple’s offline recogniser. Or type two letters: everyday foods are built in, packaged products from Open Food Facts follow underneath.

3. 03

   Keep the ones you repeat

   Give the plate a name and the same breakfast goes in with one tap tomorrow. Fix a figure later and the correction follows everywhere it counted.

And then it leaves you alone

• No target

  Nothing to fail at

  No daily calorie goal, no score for the day, no streak to break. It shows what you ate and leaves it at that. Set a target only if you want one.

• Your day

  Breakfast, lunch, dinner — if you say so

  Name the meal an entry belongs to and the day groups itself. Nothing is guessed from the clock: an entry nobody assigned stays unassigned.

• Everywhere

  It counts everywhere else too

  One entry lands on the Food tile, your goals, the day’s Balance score and the weekly recap. It can go to Apple Health too, if you turn that on — the figures, never the meal.

1. 01

   Pick the figure

   Anything Apple Health holds, grouped the way you think about it rather than by which device wrote it. Pin one to a single device where your watch and your phone disagree.

2. 02

   Choose the shape

   Seven of them, from a number to a scatter. Set the span — a day, a week, a year — and attach a goal if it has one.

3. 03

   Put it where you want it

   Drag the grid into your own order. Any tile opens onto a small dashboard of its own, which you also build.

Six kinds of tile

• Reading

  Anything Apple Health has

  One figure or several, drawn seven ways — a number, a sparkline, a hero with supporting figures, one figure plotted against another, a scatter. Its own span of time, from a day to a year.

• Ready-made

  Eight tiles already built

  Movement, Energy, Training, Vitals, Food, Sleep and Balance — so a new dashboard is one tap rather than a shopping list.

• Goals

  What you said you would do

  A daily or weekly target, or a weight you are heading for from a starting point the app measured. Never in red for being behind.

• Live

  The heart rate monitor, on the home screen

  The one tile that is not a picture of the past: your heart rate now, in its zone colour. Tap it and you are in a workout.

• Headline

  A sentence, in your words or its own

  The line the dashboard opens with. Automatic, or write your own and it prints exactly that.

• Lifeline

  The trace across the top

  Flat when there is nothing to say, alive when there is — or switched to your live heart rate.

• On the Lock Screen

  It keeps going when the phone does not

  A ticking clock, your heart rate in its zone colour, and a button that logs another set — on the Lock Screen and round the Dynamic Island, without unlocking anything.

• Five zones

  Against your ceiling, not a default one

  Any standard Bluetooth monitor gives the workout a minute-by-minute trace and seconds in each of five zones. The zones come from your own maximum and are stamped when the workout is saved, so editing the setting later cannot move the bands behind an old graph.

• Every movement

  Three cues and the one mistake

  Which muscles it lands on, three cues in order, and the one thing that most often goes wrong, with the positions drawn. No rep ranges, no promises about a body it has never met.

• Alongside Health

  What your watch thought, kept separate

  A workout stamps what Apple Health recorded over the same hour, and says how much the two coincide. Two accounts of one hour, shown as two.

01

The workout

A workout, monitor or no monitor

Start a workout and log sets as you go. 48 exercises, each asking only for what it is measured by — weight and reps for a bench press, time for a plank. Anything not on the list is typed in, and keeps its own chart.

• 48 exercises catalogued
• Custom workouts you repeat
• Or write your own

02

Route

Where you actually went

Distance, pace and climb read off your own GPS track rather than estimated, and every kilometre gets its own split. Share one and the first and last 200 metres come off first — a route map is a map of where you live.

• Your own GPS track
• Split by kilometre
• Trimmed before it is shared

03

Progression

Every exercise keeps one line

Any period adds up by workout and by exercise: time, weight lifted, sets, best set. Open a row for the whole history of that movement. Bench is bench, whichever workout it sat in.

• Weight lifted and sets
• Best set per workout
• One history per movement

• A workout

  A picture of what you did

  Made on the phone: the route on its own map, or — for a workout that lifted — the wheel showing where the training landed. Three figures under it, in the shape that reads in a message.

• The trim

  Two hundred metres come off each end

  Always, with no switch to turn it off, because a privacy default that can be disabled gets disabled by the person who most needed it. The map starts along a street rather than at a doorway. The figures still come from the whole run.

• A challenge

  The invite is how they find the app

  On iOS 26 a challenge goes out through Messages over Game Center, so your friend does not need the app yet — they do need an iPhone. On earlier versions you share your week as a message instead, and Game Center friends still turn up on the board.

• The board

  Faces, and where you actually stand

  Every row carries its score in the challenge’s own unit, and yours is marked by a ring rather than floated to the top — being shown in second place is the entire point of a competition.

• 01
  Nothing is held against you for a day you did not record.

  Charts break the line across a gap. The absence of a reading is never drawn as a zero.

• 02
  No streaks to lose.

  One badge counts consecutive days, and it reports your best run ever — not the one you are on.

• 03
  No red for an off day.

  Warning colours are for physiological state only. A goal short of its target is stated in plain grey.

• 04
  No number it cannot explain.

  There is no sleep quality score, because no screen could have told you what it meant.

• 05
  No trend before it has earned one.

  Under seven nights, the Heart page says how many it has and draws no line.

• 06
  No rival the app invented.

  A challenge nobody else has entered draws one row — yours. A board of one is the truthful state of a competition of one.

• 07
  No score a rival cannot check.

  Kilometres, flights and minutes are things two people can both count. Balance was a challenge once and is not any more: nobody on the other end could audit it.

• 08
  No last place on a Monday morning.

  A week you have not logged anything in has not come last — it has not started. Those rows are left unranked, and ties share a rank.

The arithmetic behind every figure is on the how the numbers work page. What it costs is on the home page.