I see so many threads on here about users creating their own apps - mostly for the reasoning I gathered - “I like to track in my specific way, I couldn’t find an app that did it that way, so I built it myself” - or maybe just didn’t want to pay for it.

Full disclosure - I am guilty of such, I too have created an app. Not here to market it, it’s just in development on my phone.

Tracking the way us quantified selfers do is pretty niche - I sometimes think I’m a little crazy for doing it.

But all that being said, all you app creators - Has anyone turned their app into either a reasonable passive income or became such a big hit, they quit their 9-5 to support their app business full time?

Would love to hear stories. I have these big ideas in my head that I’ll release my app one day, quit my job and live the dream of working for myself. But I have a feeling it’s harder than it sounds.

Anything you would do differently, knowing what you know now?

In Jan 2024, I got a Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 to track my sleep and exercise. I noticed that whenever my sleep scores dropped, it was usually close to ovulation or menstruation, but Samsung Health's sleep scores don't reflect this. The cultural glorification of hustling also made me feel guilty about resting when my body truly needed it.

So for my final year project, I built CycleOS: An app that visualizes your sleep, exercise, and step data in the context of your menstrual cycle so that you can make informed decisions about your lifestyle habits.

https://preview.redd.it/zfzxkmrkj9ge1.png?width=1800&format=png&auto=webp&s=d435c222b7853e3ecb1096d40f27b4ab25630137

Important Features:

• Everything's stored on your device: Nothing is synced to a database on the internet.
• No accounting for pregnancy: Because I don't know if the Trump administration will use this information against users. Might change in the future.
• No scores or predictive algorithms: If you slept 5 hours and genuinely felt energetic, great. If you feel tired from 6 hours of sleep, CycleOS will encourage you to rest. Menstrual-related changes vary greatly from person to person and cycle to cycle, and you know yourself best. Personally, my follicular phase is plagued with fatigue—not energy, according to the cycle syncing textbook—and if I deprive myself of the rest I need, my life is more likely to fall apart.

Core Features:

• Track your menstrual cycle
• Track your symptoms (mood, energy, digestion, pain, etc.)
• Import sleep and exercise data from a wearable via other health apps (e.g. Samsung Health)
• Visualize how your sleep, exercise, and symptoms vary across the menstrual cycle

I believe our bodies are incredibly resilient and self-healing. If you had a poor night's sleep, you'll recover in the upcoming days—but only if you give it a chance to do so. I hope CycleOS will help you gain that awareness so that you can hustle less and flow more.

If you're interested in beta-testing so that the app can be listed on the Play Store, here's the link to sign up. I'll send a follow-up email within 24 hours. Thank you in advance for your interest!

I've been working on developing healthier habits and tracking them, but am struggling a bit with be consistent. I'm curious, what have you guys done to help with habit formation and information tracking, organization, etc.? Are there any good systems I should look into for this?

Hi everyone,

Exciting new announcement from the r/ReflectTrackAnything team: We've released the initial version of Metric Formulas in Reflect version 1.80.0! A little context on Reflect - Track Anything for those who are unfamiliar - it's an iOS app for customizable tracking, goal setting, running self-experiments, and discovering actionable insights. We're essentially building it to be the Swiss Army Knife of self-improvement.

The Formulas feature allows you to combine multiple metrics into a custom formula that you can use in many of the usual places: goal setting, Insights, Events, and so on. The initial version of Metric Formulas supports operations like addition/subtraction, multiplication/division, and performing a mean or sum of a selected list of metrics.

Here's a few motivating examples of how you could use metric formulas:

• Combine multiple Timer metrics (Work, Reading, Chores) into a Productive Time formula metric
• Take the mean of some mood metrics (stressed, anxious, tense) into a Tension/Anxiety formula metric
• Take the mean of your Total Sleep time from different wearables if you have more than one
• Combine individual symptoms (nasal congestion, coughing, sneezing) into a Respiratory Symptoms formula metric

To access the Formulas page, simply click on the sidebar from the main page and select "Formulas." Formula metrics should show up in search throughout the app and will be marked by the function symbol next to the metric name.

This feature is still in beta, so we're actively looking for feedback from users. Are there metric formulas you want to define, but can't yet do with what's available now? Please let us know on our Discord in the #feature-requests channel, on our public roadmap or post in the comments below.

Note: Formulas currently aren't supported in Weekly/Monthly Reports and Plots yet. We're working on adding that in the near future!

If you're looking to know a little bit of backstory of why this feature was released, you can read this blog post I wrote. The short version of the story is that the Reflect goal setting feature worked too well for me, and I ended up working on Reflect to the exclusion of other priorities in life. So I wanted to create a combined goal across multiple dimensions of how I spend my time.

Hey everyone!

I’ve been struggling to keep track of all my health data from my oura ring, smart watch, lab test results, and even the apps I use.

It feels like everything is scattered across different places, and it’s hard to make sense of it all.

I’m curious about how do you manage it? Do you have a system that works for you? Do you also struggle to keep everything organized?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! 😊

I started to use RealizD for screen-time tracking but I can't find any reviews on this app and it seems like a dead project? Last update 5 years ago. I need export option which should be available after purchase but I'm afraid if it's gonna work. Anyone using this app here?

Or can you recommend other apps for screen-time tracking on iPad? With data export. Thanks.

Goood morning everyone! First of all thank you so much for the response on my last post, I really appreciate it!

Wanted to give an update with some new Cora features:

• Metric history (with deletable entries) — tap a metric and there’s now a section with all your historical entires
• Adaptable duration units in graphs — the units adapt based on how long the duration is
• Correlating with durations — this was not supported previously
• New user tutorial and popup to hopefully make the app less confusing!
• Fixed critical bug where Stats graph numbers wouldn’t show up

Next up, I’m thinking:

• Apple Health Syncing — I’m anticipating this will be a pain in the ass
• Graph interactivity — Stuff like being able to tap a bar and see its date and value (open to ideas here)
• Different aggregation functions — For bar graph, right now it just averages per day. Would be nice if you can choose other ones like sum

If you have any ideas and/or feedback on these features please leave a comment!

Also special shoutout to all the people that have given me feedback so far in the Discord and Reddit DMs! I'm glad you took the time out of your day to not only check out Cora, but consider how to make it better!

App store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cora-data-driven-lifestyles/id6737651703

https://preview.redd.it/uop98cwsvree1.png?width=2005&format=png&auto=webp&s=20a6a3e3512b3dac2797db97e768afead29ba912

I was playing around and found out that you can export all your Apple health data. I've been wearing an Apple watch for 8 years and whoop for 3 years. I always check my day to day and week to week stats but I never looked at the data over the years.

I exported my data and there was 989MB of data! So I needed to write some code to break this down. The code takes in your export data and gives you options to look at Steps, Distance, Heart rate, Sleep and more. It gave me some cool charts.

I was really stressed at work last 2 years.

Then I decided to pass this data to ChatGPT. It gave me some CRAZY insights:

• Seasonal Anomalies: While there's a general trend of higher activity in spring/summer, some of your most active periods occurred during winter months, particularly in December and January of recent years.
• Reversed Weekend Pattern: Unlike most people who are more active on weekends, your data shows consistently lower step counts on weekends, suggesting your physical activity is more tied to workdays than leisure time.
• COVID Impact: There's a clear signature of the pandemic in your data, with more erratic step patterns and changed workout routines during 2020-2021, followed by a distinct recovery pattern in late 2021.
• Morning Consistency: Your most successful workout periods consistently occur in morning hours, with these sessions showing better heart rate performance compared to other times.

You can run this on your own computer. No one can access your data. For the A.I. part, you need to send it to chatGPT or if you want privacy use your own self hosted LLM. Here's the link.

If you need more guidance on how to run it (not a programmer), check out my detailed instructions here.

If people like this, I will make a web app version so you can run it without using code. Give this a like if you find it useful!

For years, I’ve been on and off with tracking—weight, steps, and the usual stuff. It’s always felt kind of natural to me to collect that data, I could never stick with it. If I didn’t track perfectly, I’d feel like, “Well, what’s the point?” and just stop altogether.

Then I stumbled across this sub, and it completely changed how I think about tracking. Seeing so many of you with multi-year streaks made me realize something huge: nobody’s tracking is perfect. Over the course of a year (or longer), those little slip-ups or missed entries don’t matter. They just blend into the averages, and you still get meaningful data from the bigger picture.

I’d been so stuck on the short-term—weekly averages, daily fluctuations, or small changes—that I never really thought about the long-term trends. This subreddit showed me that even imperfect data can reveal so much when you zoom out.

What I’m Tracking This Year

This year, I’m diving deeper into tracking. Here’s what’s on my list right now:

• Weight
• Active Time
• Running
• Sexual Frequency
• Shower/Hygiene Frequency
• Caffeine Intake
• Calorie Counting
• 24/7 Time Tracking

What I’m Learning

The biggest lesson so far has been letting go of perfection. Tracking isn’t about having a flawless log; it’s about learning, observing, and improving over time. Missing a day or two—or even a week—doesn’t ruin the entire effort.

If you’ve ever struggled with this all-or-nothing mindset, I just want to say: give yourself some grace. The long-term trends are what really matter, and every little bit of data you collect adds to the bigger picture.

I’m curious—what are you all tracking right now? And how do you stay consistent without letting the little mistakes get to you?

https://preview.redd.it/mse4gac8gdee1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=fccac756554a9dd6861f4424636dfb1a03e5cf05

Hi Team

I made a thing!! This is IGOR - a tiny device based around a D1 mini + KY-040 + OLED.

As a platform, it has a lot of potential. Specifically for my use case, I made this/ programmed it to enable and encourage quiet focus sessions (either counting up or counting down) and recording the amount of minutes you achieve.

The distraction free, tiny form factor really helped me, and I hope it might help you too.

I have no doubt it'd quite easy if you're looking for something physical to customise and fit your quantified/ quantifiable routines (particularly those that rely on user monitoring/ input).

If you want to learn more about it, I made a YouTube video to introduce it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wko0zgRGtPI

This is the link to the files/ instructions: https://www.printables.com/model/1019283-project-igor-open-source-offline-loyal-cheerful-fo

And this is the link to the software/ instructions: https://github.com/UrbanCircles/igor

If you discover something I'm missing, please be help me refine this/ fix/ improve - I'm a beginner at this, so it's likely I might have made some mistakes. This is just the start - I think the form factor + components really give a great base to build more functionality on. Let me know on GitHub if you want to join me.

Hi Reddit fitness enthusiasts!

After a lot of reading and taking feedback from fellow Redditors, I’ve narrowed down my choices for a fitness app that provides in-depth data and analytics. I'm someone who loves digging into the details of my workouts and health metrics, so I'm looking for an app that excels in tracking and offering actionable insights.

Here are my top contenders:

1. Athlytic: From what I've gathered, it seems to focus on recovery, readiness, and overall performance tracking. I’ve seen it mentioned as a good choice for people who prioritize holistic health metrics.
2. PeakWatch: This one is praised for its real-time performance tracking and daily recommendations. It seems to cater to those who enjoy immediate feedback for tweaking workouts and staying on track.
3. Bevel: Known for its sleek interface and customizable tracking options. It appears to be a strong contender for people who like more control over their fitness data presentation.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts if you’ve tried any of these! Specifically:

• How accurate is the data compared to similar apps or wearables?
• Do you feel the insights they provide are actionable and help improve your fitness routine?
• Any pros/cons or personal stories about using these apps?

I’m not tied to any specific fitness goals—general health, strength, and endurance improvement are my focus. I just want something that truly helps me understand my data and make better decisions about recovery, training, and overall wellness.

Would love to hear your feedback before I commit! Let me know your experiences, or if there’s a hidden gem I missed.

Thanks in advance! 💪

View Poll

Some Background
I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2024 and have been using Vyvanse since then. Some days I feel great, while other days I might feel irritated, depressed, or sad. I wanted to better understand what affects my mood and energy, so I built a system around it.

What I Built

I think I may have overdone the quantified self-tracking because now I don’t even feel like using it anymore! I created a tracking tool in Retool, connected to a PostgreSQL database to store my data.

The idea behind the system is that my energy, mood, and productivity levels change throughout the day, so I built it to allow multiple log entries for different categories at different times. For example, if my first entry of the day is at 8 AM and the next one is at 10 AM, the 10 AM entry reflects what happened between 8 AM and 10 AM.

What I Track

Energy
The energy score is the average of the following:

• Physical Energy (1-5)
• Mental Energy (1-5)
• General Motivation (1-5)

Performance
The performance score is the average of the quantitative factors.

• Qualitative factors:
  • Planned task to work on
  • Actual task worked on
  • Type of task I worked on
  • If the planned task ≠ actual task, then deviation = true.
• Quantitative factors:
  • Productivity (1-5)
  • Focus (1-5)
  • Task Motivation (1-5)

Mood
I’ve split mood into two general categories: positive and negative. Using these, I calculate a score called Emotional Balance:

$$ \text{Emotional Balance} = \frac{(\text{Positive Score} \times #\text{Positive Feelings}) - (\text{Negative Score} \times #\text{Negative Feelings})}{#\text{Positive Feelings} + #\text{Negative Feelings}} $$

For example, if I score a positive score of 3 (on a 1-5 scale) and log three positive emotions (e.g., happy, calm, motivated), and a negative score of 2 with two negative feelings (e.g., sad, exhausted), the Emotional Balance score would be:

$$ \frac{(3 \times 3) - (2 \times 2)}{3 + 2} = 1 $$

Social Interaction
I log how socially interactive I was, using a similar calculation as mood. I record positive and negative scores based on my interactions and behaviors.

Medication
I log my medication, including what I took and the time I took it.

Other Tools I Use
I also log my habits in Notion, track calories in Lose It, and monitor my health metrics with my WHOOP strap.

Where I Am Now
I feel like this whole system has become overkill. My original goal was to better understand myself, but now it feels like tracking everything is too much effort. Logging all this data has started to feel like a chore, and I’m not sure if it’s worth it anymore.

Hello everyone,

I recently discovered the Guava app through this thread, and I’m absolutely thrilled. It’s exactly the tool I’ve always been looking for!

The only weakness in my current process is that the tracked foods are not categorized. I track my foods using the YAZIO app. The macros and food names are then synced with Guava via Apple Health.

When I import photos directly into Guava, the foods are categorized, but not when tracked via YAZIO. Is there a way to manually categorize them afterwards or another automated solution? Thanks!

A while ago, someone mentioned in a comment thread I can't find now that there are a couple of Dutch doctors on Youtube that are talking about quantified self processes and the accuracy/inaccuracy of certain tests and tools. Does anyone know anything about them? Are there other doctors, on YT or anywhere else, that are doing such investigation? Thank you!

EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions so far. I just want to explain the reason I’m leaning more towards tedious manual customised input is because of what I’m trying to test. The main thing I’m looking for is how my body responds several days after variables such as exercise and rest. This is why existing health apps are not what I’m looking for, but rather something slightly more sophisticated than google forms.

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to test some particular hypotheses about my health. I’d like some input on my solution idea, and comments on whether I’m overthinking this.

Context: I’m struggling with dizziness, brain fog, fatigue and tachycardia with no clear results on tests. Could be long Covid, could be depression, could be drug side effects, could be deconditioning, could be diet, could be lack of sleep, could be something else. We’re doing more tests but it’s annoying and slow.

The main thing I want to track to try and identify is Post Exertion Malaise. That’s when you get weaker from exercise and exertion instead of stronger, and it completely changes the way you should manage your health.

The existing health apps don’t seem optimised to detect PEM, so I’d like to make a simple system to do so. I also want to keep track of my health anxiety/OCD, obsessive googling, theories and mindsets that I keep coming back to.

So what I’m thinking is I need a few input forms to track some things: Daily:

• Date
• last nights sleep
• last 3 nights sleep avg
• avg sleep the past week
• Exercise yesterday
• Exercise day before yesterday
• Exercise in the past week

Daily:

• Protein
• Hydration
• Electrolytes
• Yes/no for a list of medications
• Activities done that day
• Hours spent obsessing about health and doom scrolling

Monthly:

• blood results
• Latest chronic meds regime

Ad hoc:

• Date
• Time of day
• Yes/no or rating scale for a list of symptoms
• Hydrated at the time
• Hungry at the time
• Some other factors

Ad hoc:

• New hypotheses
• Mood and mindset
• Productivity
• Anything that seems to help
• General journaling

I want to input this information with simple forms on my mobile. I want the inputs written to tables in a database in the cloud. I’d like to query, summarise and join these tables by date etc. I want to export data and do simple correlations/graphs in google sheets or some other dashboard to see relationships.

I’ve kind of started this system with google forms. But then I end up having separate google sheets that I’d have to export somewhere else in order to join them. I don’t want to continuously download google sheets and then import CSVs into R.

Is there a mobile app or service that I can use for this? Paid is fine. I downloaded AirTable but haven’t had a chance to look at it yet.

So yeah, please let me know what you think of my system idea. Maybe it’s best achieved with technology, or maybe it needs to be scaled way back and should just be one google form completed daily.

Thanks everyone!

I've been working on a tracking app with what I think are some unique features which I think would serve the users of this subreddit nicely. I haven't worked on it for a few months so would love to get some feedback to finally decide whether it's worth resuming development or not. It's still a little rough around the edges but fully functional Momentum Tracker

What gets measured gets managed

Motivation for building the app

I've designed the app to make it easy to "measure" by making it as frictionless as possible to input data whilst still capturing detailed information. On the "manage" side, I wanted to allow users to view their data at a detailed level, and also view correlations at a detailed level. For example with other trackers you may record you drank a "coffee", but this leaves omits information such as how much sugar, calories, caffeine etc there is. Even if you can add that data, it's often siloed inside each "habit". If you had "Coffee" and "Snacks", you often can't view the total caloric value. With my app, that's not the case as the underlying data is what's important, not the name of the habit.

I also added some AI features (just hear me out!) where instead of a numeric value, you can supply a prompt as the value and the AI will autofill that value. It'll also use any other data you submitted as context. If you went for a 1 mile run and don't know how many calories you burned you can instead put in a prompt and AI will fill in that value for you based on a 1 mile distance. Similarly you can add a photo and the AI will use that as context. Eg take a snap of the run stats from your treadmill, and AI will extract the information for you. The app will also extract the date/time from the photo so you could simply take a photo after each run and upload the images as a batch for the week. I've found this really useful for recording my weight progression without having to resort to getting a smart scale. I've found this really useful especially because taking a photo is already very frictionless. You could also use this to "import" data from another app by taking a screenshot.

How to use the app
You create a reusable actions, eg Coffee.
You add labels to the action. For Coffee that might be "sugar", "caffeine", "calories". There are no units, but you can add it to the label for convenience "sugar(g)" "caffeine(mg). You can even add the same label multiple times with different units "sugar(g)" "sugar(tbsp)". If you can't be bothered to convert the values you could instead supply a prompt "Convert the sugar(g) value to table spoon".

Some values scale linearly, some do not, some are always the same. Eg a Run is one Run whether you go for a 1 mile run or a 10 mile run. Calories burned on a run scales linearly with distance. The duration of the run is always going to be different. So the action might look like

Run

• distance(miles) - 1 - linear
• calories - -100 - linear
• run sessions - 1 - fixed
• time(minutes) - slider(manual input)
• run-speed - average run speed in miles/hour - prompt

Theres also a timer feature the the duration is used as quantity.

Linking Action state with Labels

This is kind of a checklist feature. You can have the action highlighted as Completed or Blocked based on that value of any label. A simple use case would be going for a daily run. You'd link the action with "run sessions" with a target value 1 and it would be marked as completed after each run. A more complex use case might be if you wanted to create an allowance system. You can have that snack only if your daily caloric intake is less than your target.

Viewing Data

You can view the data on the Charts. Add a new Chart Group and add the labels you want to view, along with whether you want to view the sum, average, or raw data.

If you have any questions, or feature suggestions just ask away!

Thanks!

Hello!

I'm interested in what apps do you use for self-tracking? I have an Android phone which I have with me all the time but I also have a PC, Macbook and iPad. Recently I was looking for apps to track screen time. I've been using App Usage on my phone for years but I can't find suitable apps for PC, Macbook and iPad. Few days ago I found an app ActivityWatch which looks promising for tracking screen time on PC and Macbook but still I need something for iPad. Any recommendations? I don't need focusing and productivity functions, I want just the simple screen time tracker which works automatically without a need to manually start/stop activity. And with the export option of course.

For time tracking of activities outside of devices I'm using aTimeLogger (although there's a new version aTimeLogger Pro but I couldn't find what's the difference so I'm still using the old one). And for mood tracking and occurrence tracking I'm using Dailyo. Lastly I started to use Money Manager for expenses tracking.

Inspired by this I'm thinking of starting tracking my location and maybe the weather too. I was thinking about tracking visited cities and countries manually using Dailyo and I'm already using Garmin watches for tracking activities outside of cities like hiking and biking.

I'll be really glad if you share with me apps you're using for mentioned purposes. Thank you!

I'd like to track where I am within my house. Tracking where my laptop is would also be fine for this purpose (I'm trying to get my laptop to switch modes depending on whether I'm in bed, mostly, to encourage good sleep habits).

Any suggestions? Has anyone done stuff with RFID or bluetooth?

I gave wifi a try but it doesn't work well enough with one AP (and I'm not sure how to test the strength of one I'm not connected to easily, either).

I don't use a cell phone or smart watch, so that's a bad way to track my own location. If someone wants to recommend something wearable that has at least 1 week battery life I'd be open to the idea.

I've been working on building an app called TimeAlign to help people make data-driven decisions with how they invest their time.

The idea is simple: learn from past behaviors to optimize your future plans.

TimeAlign closes the feedback loop on time management by accounting for your tracked activity and scheduled time to quantify, understand, and align how you actually spend your time with how you planned to spend it.

The goal is to eventually capture and layer more context to your tracked time in order to generate more optimized schedules.

Question for the QS community:
What additional context/metrics would make this app more useful?

https://preview.redd.it/mcyxxgrk68ce1.png?width=2540&format=png&auto=webp&s=7068bb9ef50443181289e983f53af8799f1b0660

I did manual meal tracking 2-3 years ago but I stopped because it was way too cumbersome and time-consuming for the results.
I know there are apps now that can track meals using photos and AI.
I'm searching for an app like this with a good data export like CSV or Excel.
Also I would like to track specific foods like apples, beef, and noodles. Most of the apps focus on calories and nutrition. Which is fine for me as long as the export also contains data about the specific foods.
Does anybody know an app like this?

Hi! I'm doing my Master's thesis on self-tracking, and I'm looking for people to interview about how and why they self-track. The interview would last about 1 hour and would be done with Zoom (or some other video-call platform you prefer).

I'm interested in hearing from self-trackers of all kinds! I'm not affiliated with any brand or business.

Drop a comment or send me message if you are interested!