Plain and Simple Health
The health data your phone already keeps, made easy to look at.
Who this is for
For anyone whose iPhone has been quietly recording their health for years and who has never found it easy to look at. Apple keeps a great deal on your phone and then makes it awkward to read — Apple Support's own answer is that there is no Home Screen widget for Health data, and there is no step complication either.
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.
It assumes there is already something recorded. 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 an empty chart.
How to set it up
- 01Install it and open it. It asks to read your health data, and you choose how much to share. Every screen works with whatever you allow, and says when a figure is missing instead of showing a zero.
- 02Choose what the tab bar holds. Three of the five slots are yours; everything else lives under More.
- 03Put the widget on your Home Screen, and the app on your watch, if you want the numbers without opening anything.
- 04Type in what you eat, if you want that too — or scan a barcode and have the product graded.
- 05Export whenever you like: CSV for a spreadsheet, or JSON Lines for a script.
What it does
It shows what Apple Health already holds — steps, sleep, exertion, workouts and the rest — as scores on a Today screen, a board you arrange yourself, and charts with sparklines rather than a wall of figures.
It interprets rather than only reporting. Some metrics get a verdict, a card each day points at something worth noticing, and a published national reference table gives one figure a population percentile. Each of those explains its method on a screen of its own, so you can disagree with it.
Scan a packaged product and it grades it and lists the additives. The whole food database ships inside the app — built from USDA's public-domain FoodData Central and from Open Food Facts — so scanning works on a plane, and nothing is ever looked up anywhere.
It reads your date of birth and your biological sex from Health, because the percentile table is tabulated by both. It stores neither, and neither goes anywhere.
It writes back exactly one thing: the food you type in, and a run you recorded on the watch. Nothing it calculates is ever written to Health.
It never sends anything anywhere. There is no network code in the project at all, and a test fails the build if any appears.