I build this iOS app because I wanted to get an overview of my time in zones per week without checking zones after every workout manually - Now I'm looking for feedback.
Description: Track time in heart rate zones. Track per day, week, month, 7 days and 30 days time period and how much time you spend in each zone. Set goals & visualize progress. Get details about heart rates zones of your workouts.
Features: Custom time periods, Workout to zone attribution to get a feeling which sport attributed most to each zone, Multiple zone calculation methods, Set personal time goals for any zone, Workout breakdown
Pricing: Free
Privacy: Nothing is tracked or send somewhere. Data is just on your device.
I like this visualization! I'm not doing a kind of training these days where it would be useful for me, but I wish I'd known about something like it when I was.
Do you support Apple watch? I never actually targeted that or owned one (I like a much more stylish smartwatch!) and thus don't immediately know how to spot that integration on an App Store detail page, hence the need to ask. But I get the sense a lot of folks who do train seriously like to do that with an Apple watch as primary or only device, and I could see enough utility in getting something like this kind of view in effective real time, to make the integration possibly worth considering. (If not already present! Or who knows, maybe Apple watches natively do that and now I know what the "heart rate push" feature on mine is imitating... ;)
bryan0 6 hours ago [-]
The Apple watch Workout app has a heart zone view while you're working out, but I don't think it has a workaround summary of how much time you spent in each zone.
vitaflo 4 hours ago [-]
That gets pushed to the Fitness app on iOS. It breaks down the entire workout.
ellisv 4 hours ago [-]
But unfortunately Fitness and Health don’t summarize HR zone data across workouts
IncreasePosts 27 minutes ago [-]
Heart rate zone training is always useful for general health. Unless you have an ultra terminal illness you would probably benefit from some zone 2 training...basically just a brisk walk(where you can still have a conversation, but you feel like you're putting in more work than sitting on a couch, probably around 125 bpm) for 45 mins 2 or 3x a week will greatly improve the heart health for most people.
ellisv 4 hours ago [-]
Congratulations!
I also wrote an iOS app to do this exact same thing, although it’s unfinished and unpublished. I had a lot of trouble getting the app to perform well (what’s your secret?!)
Couple of things I implemented that you may want to consider:
1) onboarding flow to help users setup the app on first launch
2) filter certain workouts to include/exclude by type, duration, etc
3) home screen widget
Id love to chat if you’re open to it.
serial_dev 9 hours ago [-]
Congrats on the launch! I really would have thought it’s already part of the iOS built in apps!
You mentioned it’s your first app. Did you vibe code your way through it or did you heavily use AI?
I played around with Swift SwiftUI and I felt that AI helped me a lot in contrast to my day to day job, humongous code base, I can’t get AI to get those mythical 100x productivity gains, more like 0.37x, but for new projects it’s been great, so I was wondering…
cyberpunk 6 hours ago [-]
Okay, admittedly I'm somewhat of a greybeard by this point... However... I thought that vibe coding was .... exactly heavily using AI...
I know this not the place; but what exactly is your definition of 'vibe coding' since you've used it with such confidence in your comment perhaps you can enlighten this programmer..
5 hours ago [-]
CharlesW 8 hours ago [-]
> I really would have thought it’s already part of the iOS built in apps!
Sort of. You can only see your real-time heart rate on your phone when you're doing a cycling workout for some weird reason. Otherwise you have to awkwardly look at your watch if you're walking/running.
mathgeek 7 hours ago [-]
I was surprised that the watch is the awkward thing to look at for you, as I have always found a phone to be awkward to look at while working out in any way. Learned a new perspective today.
ra7 6 hours ago [-]
This doesn't entirely help, but for most (if not all) workouts, you can set alerts for specific heart rate zones. Of course, this is very cumbersome to do per workout on the watch.
yapyap 8 hours ago [-]
0.37x is slower
From the vibe of your comment I assume you mean 1.37x
switchbak 7 hours ago [-]
> 0.37x is slower
I don't think that's an accident.
voisin 3 hours ago [-]
It would be great if it was quicker to switch between time periods, like swiping to compare week by week or month by month.
Also, to filter by workout type. I care about zone for running but not for strength.
tchock23 7 hours ago [-]
Nicely done! UI is clean and I really like that you give different options on how to calculate the zones since most apps just take the simplified % of max HR for zone calculations.
pbreit 6 hours ago [-]
Can an iPhone app figure out your blood pressure (with sufficient reliability)?
Oh that's clever! Garmin's watches[1] estimate stress levels by variability of pulse rate, and they estimate breathing rate by looking for sinus arrhythmia (the benign change in heart rate speeding up when breathing in and slowing down when breathing out) which is cool. I wonder if any pick up ectopic beats with the normal continuous pulse sensor and not the 1-lead EKG thing?
[1] possibly other brands too, I didn't look
kube-system 6 hours ago [-]
... if you connect a blood pressure monitor, yes.
This app isn't figuring out your heart rate with just the phone's hardware. It is displaying heart rate data from Apple Fitness, which comes from heart rate sensor data (e.g. the one on an Apple Watch)
jpc0 7 hours ago [-]
More an organisational thing but, what is the long term sustainability plan for this project. Apple Developer Program isn’t free and apple isn’t exactly well known for keeping stable APIs.
If the answer is “until I don’t want to do it anymore” that is perfectly fine but then can there be a commitment to open sourcing (if it isn’t already) when you make that decision?
throwanem 7 hours ago [-]
I seriously doubt Apple will casually abandon HealthKit. They are not Google, and I'm sure the contracts underpinning MFi and similar marks for major partners have savagely punitive terms that would enable those partners to recover in any such case.
jpc0 7 hours ago [-]
Not what I was referring to, hope this clarifies but apple seems willing to change the API which would require dev time to implement, ie this isn’t a project you can stick on the app store and ignore, it will require continuous effort and cash to keep there and compatible.
As an individual developer is the owner of the app and code I just want to know if the app will still exist in a year and be functional, otherwise I am not interested regardless of me liking the app idea.
If OP would like to charge money or accept donations or whatever they would like to do that is fine, but right now those questions are unanswered.
throwanem 5 hours ago [-]
Okay, all granted, but now that we agree you keep all your data which is safe, we only need discuss how no other than totally trivial project I think can really be "[stuck] on the app store and [ignored]," not for more than a couple years. Anything with meaningful platform integration would impose the same requirement, not to mention the $100 pa vig and time investment required just to show up at the party. In 2025, for something whose basic concept is obvious and the differentiator is polish, I don't see this as a tremendously reasonable showstopper the way you're treating it, even for a first time dev.
"Assume good faith" and that. Fair to ask, but show the courtesy due an equal at least until it is evident that is unwarranted. This engineer has done work demonstrating they are at least my equal and I am not prepared to treat them otherwise only because I have not seen them do so before. The 32/64 bit and Intel/Arm transitions should be enough warning for anyone and lie well within living memory.
Someone may cavil over "polish," I suppose. I have a 5-quart 'Artisan' Kitchen-Aid stand mixer in lavender, because that nicely sets off my kitchen decor and because I impose light enough duty on that machine to make aesthetics a reasonable figure of merit. This app is not that kind of machine. Who cares what color the cover plates are, when the target audience will never run the machine with them installed anyway?
(And unless there exists a design patent, why worry about a case where, at worst, you already know what market you need your product to fit?)
jayunit 3 hours ago [-]
Congrats! I've been wanting exactly this app. I paid $5.99 for HealthFit trying to get similar information, but it doesn't (afaik) show the weekly/daily zone summaries.
I'd really love to see last week's information. Especially since you launched on a Monday, I'd love to have a new-user experience that shows me last week's info.
Other misc feedback:
1. Upon launching the app, I didn't see any data. Had to go into the gear menu -> approve health data sharing. I think it'd be better to push the user to this approval flow on their first session? (Edit: Aha, after watching the video: settings -> time period -> last 7 days)
2. Neither here nor there, but I wanted to download this so searched the app store on my phone for "heart rate zones plus" and this app was #16. I'm curious if anyone in the discussion knows -- how is this search rating determined? Is there anything the author can do to improve the ranking?
IncreasePosts 23 minutes ago [-]
This is a horrible abuse of computing power, but what I do is track my heart rate zones in Polar Beat (for my brand of heart rate monitor), and then I just screenshot the summary page for the workout. Then, once every week or two, I just dump my screenshots into Gemini and ask it to produce a report, where I get things like weekly averages, moving averages, highs & lows, etc.
tea-coffee 3 hours ago [-]
Not sure if it is mentioned in the app description, but how is heart rate calculated? Using the Apple Watch?
kccqzy 6 hours ago [-]
I would prefer an adaptive approach where the user also enters perceived difficulty and the app learns the correlation between heart rate and perceived difficulty to figure out the zones. I consistently have high heart rate during exercise: a normal walk might get my heart rate to 130, and a moderate run (10:30/mile) might get my heart rate to 180. A very fast run gets my heart rate to 215 (this is beyond the max measurement of the Apple Watch which is 210bpm; I had to use a Garmin HRM to get this measurement). I don't really trust the zones information iOS calculates by default, and it seems like I also can't trust the zones in this app. Switching to the Karvonen method makes the numbers look believable, but I'm not sure where the intensity comes from.
IncreasePosts 19 minutes ago [-]
Have you talked to a doctor about this? It's certainly not normal. Do you have hyperthyroidism, anemia, or anything like that which can cause elevated heart rates during exercise?
wesgarrison 5 hours ago [-]
This is great, congrats on shipping it!
I like the interface but for the life of me I think I should be able to go back a period (“last week”). I think a week starts on Monday?
maperz 7 hours ago [-]
Congratulations on your first App! I like the clean design and the simple configuration.
I would love to have a widget that shows my progress in the zones. Ideally this could be configured to e.g. only show progress in Zone 2 if thats my current training goal.
Keep up the good work and thanks for sharing!
ra7 6 hours ago [-]
Looks clean!
Does the Health app not allow you to automatically grab resting heart rate and max heart rate? I'm not sure why I would manually set those values in settings when they are already tracked in Health.
nikitoci 7 hours ago [-]
The ability to set max heart rate manually would be appreciated, neither of five available formulas provide accurate estimates at least for me.
aaronbrethorst 5 hours ago [-]
neat, I built something similar last year to help me learn SwiftUI: https://www.zone2.app
nonameiguess 9 hours ago [-]
I can't tell from reading the listing if this is a feature or not, but if not, you should add the ability to set custom targets that match your real heart rate zones rather than relying on the naive population estimators that Apple gives you, along with more important metrics like LT1 and LT2 thresholds and VO2 max. Ideally, this would be a feature of the exercise tracker itself, but getting it in a data rollup app is better than nothing.
Description: Track time in heart rate zones. Track per day, week, month, 7 days and 30 days time period and how much time you spend in each zone. Set goals & visualize progress. Get details about heart rates zones of your workouts.
Features: Custom time periods, Workout to zone attribution to get a feeling which sport attributed most to each zone, Multiple zone calculation methods, Set personal time goals for any zone, Workout breakdown
Pricing: Free
Privacy: Nothing is tracked or send somewhere. Data is just on your device.
Any feedback and features request is appreciated.
Download: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/heart-rate-zones-plus/id674474...
Video of the app in action: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-qtHxEdMEv0
Do you support Apple watch? I never actually targeted that or owned one (I like a much more stylish smartwatch!) and thus don't immediately know how to spot that integration on an App Store detail page, hence the need to ask. But I get the sense a lot of folks who do train seriously like to do that with an Apple watch as primary or only device, and I could see enough utility in getting something like this kind of view in effective real time, to make the integration possibly worth considering. (If not already present! Or who knows, maybe Apple watches natively do that and now I know what the "heart rate push" feature on mine is imitating... ;)
I also wrote an iOS app to do this exact same thing, although it’s unfinished and unpublished. I had a lot of trouble getting the app to perform well (what’s your secret?!)
Couple of things I implemented that you may want to consider:
1) onboarding flow to help users setup the app on first launch
2) filter certain workouts to include/exclude by type, duration, etc
3) home screen widget
Id love to chat if you’re open to it.
You mentioned it’s your first app. Did you vibe code your way through it or did you heavily use AI?
I played around with Swift SwiftUI and I felt that AI helped me a lot in contrast to my day to day job, humongous code base, I can’t get AI to get those mythical 100x productivity gains, more like 0.37x, but for new projects it’s been great, so I was wondering…
I know this not the place; but what exactly is your definition of 'vibe coding' since you've used it with such confidence in your comment perhaps you can enlighten this programmer..
Between the Apple Watch and Fitness app, you can see your heart rate zone during a workout, and then review workout heart rates/zones over time afterward. https://support.apple.com/guide/watch/view-heart-rate-zones-...
From the vibe of your comment I assume you mean 1.37x
I don't think that's an accident.
Also, to filter by workout type. I care about zone for running but not for strength.
[1] possibly other brands too, I didn't look
This app isn't figuring out your heart rate with just the phone's hardware. It is displaying heart rate data from Apple Fitness, which comes from heart rate sensor data (e.g. the one on an Apple Watch)
If the answer is “until I don’t want to do it anymore” that is perfectly fine but then can there be a commitment to open sourcing (if it isn’t already) when you make that decision?
As an individual developer is the owner of the app and code I just want to know if the app will still exist in a year and be functional, otherwise I am not interested regardless of me liking the app idea.
If OP would like to charge money or accept donations or whatever they would like to do that is fine, but right now those questions are unanswered.
"Assume good faith" and that. Fair to ask, but show the courtesy due an equal at least until it is evident that is unwarranted. This engineer has done work demonstrating they are at least my equal and I am not prepared to treat them otherwise only because I have not seen them do so before. The 32/64 bit and Intel/Arm transitions should be enough warning for anyone and lie well within living memory.
Someone may cavil over "polish," I suppose. I have a 5-quart 'Artisan' Kitchen-Aid stand mixer in lavender, because that nicely sets off my kitchen decor and because I impose light enough duty on that machine to make aesthetics a reasonable figure of merit. This app is not that kind of machine. Who cares what color the cover plates are, when the target audience will never run the machine with them installed anyway?
(And unless there exists a design patent, why worry about a case where, at worst, you already know what market you need your product to fit?)
I'd really love to see last week's information. Especially since you launched on a Monday, I'd love to have a new-user experience that shows me last week's info.
Other misc feedback:
1. Upon launching the app, I didn't see any data. Had to go into the gear menu -> approve health data sharing. I think it'd be better to push the user to this approval flow on their first session? (Edit: Aha, after watching the video: settings -> time period -> last 7 days)
2. Neither here nor there, but I wanted to download this so searched the app store on my phone for "heart rate zones plus" and this app was #16. I'm curious if anyone in the discussion knows -- how is this search rating determined? Is there anything the author can do to improve the ranking?
I like the interface but for the life of me I think I should be able to go back a period (“last week”). I think a week starts on Monday?
I would love to have a widget that shows my progress in the zones. Ideally this could be configured to e.g. only show progress in Zone 2 if thats my current training goal.
Keep up the good work and thanks for sharing!
Does the Health app not allow you to automatically grab resting heart rate and max heart rate? I'm not sure why I would manually set those values in settings when they are already tracked in Health.