Reference
Data & sync.
Where your entries actually live, what a backup carries, what it deliberately leaves behind, and what comes back when you pick up a new phone.
Sync is a backup, not a mirror
HealthApp is local-first. The app reads and writes to your phone; the cloud copy exists so a new device can be handed your history back.
- No account, no copy
- Everything works without signing in. If you never create an account, nothing you log leaves the phone.
- When it runs
- When you create an account, when you sign in on a device, and when you sync from inside the app. It is not a live connection — the app does not need the network to work.
- What a backup is
- A snapshot of your data, replaced by the next one. It is not a version history and it is not a second copy you can browse.
- Where it goes
- A database hosted by Supabase, in a record scoped to your account. The full processor list is in the privacy policy.
What travels
One hundred and thirty-five kinds of data, which is most of what the app holds. Grouped rather than listed, because the raw list is a key-by-key dump of the app.
- Your profile
- Name, the setup answers, sound and haptics preferences, which activity types you use.
- Lifestyle
- Habits and their history, to-dos, daily plans and their logs, morning routine and check-ins, custom and removed lifestyle items, purpose and progress.
- Fitness
- Workout log, custom and saved workouts, performance records, hidden workouts, your programme, custom timers, resting heart rate and HRV history.
- Food
- Meals, nutrients, saved and custom recipes, meal plan, grocery list, preferences, scanned barcodes, ledger rows and calorie offset, hydration and containers.
- Mind
- Moods and their context, journal, reflections, affirmations, daily intention, breathing logs and sessions, wellness programmes, chapters, and the AI consent flag.
- Sleep
- Sleep records, rested check-ins, wind-down runs and feedback, sleep plan and schedule, presets, naps, room profile and environment log, night notes.
- Health record
- Medications and the medication log, supplements and their log, vitals, dream journal — the categories held in the keychain on the device.
- What you earned
- Win ledger, score history, streak pauses, star names, the days your sky was seen, league awards. What you earn is yours to keep has to survive a new phone.
- Written-once text
- Chapter, month, season and year narrations. Each one cost a paid AI call to write; regenerating them would charge for the same words twice.
- Social
- Challenges you joined, circle and partner recaps, and your social activity log.
- Settings and guardrails
- Safety acknowledgements, breathing pace, guardrail state, detected wearables, Oura scores, and how many private zones you have set — a number, never a place.
That last one is worth explaining, because we got it wrong once. A private zone marks a place you never want a shared route to reveal — usually home. For a while the zones themselves travelled with the backup, on the reasoning that they were a setting rather than location data. They are not a setting. A zone is a coordinate, and specifically the coordinate you would least like to hand over.
What never travels
Four kinds of thing are left out, and only the first three are a decision rather than housekeeping.
- Route coordinates
- GPS traces from timed workouts stay on the device. They are not in the backup, which is what lets the app answer “Location: not collected” honestly.
- Cycle history
- Menstrual cycle tracking stays on the device. The most sensitive category the app holds does not roam.
- Private zones
- The places you have marked as never-show. A zone is a latitude and longitude, so it stays on the phone that set it. Only the number of zones travels — enough for a new phone to tell you to set them up again, and not enough to point at anything.
- Interface state
- Which sheet was open, an unsent draft, a picker position. Nothing you would notice losing, and nothing you would want restored.
The cost is real and it lands on you, not on us: route history, cycle history and your private zones do not survive a move to a new phone. On a restored device the app tells you how many zones you had and asks you to set them again, rather than recording unprotected routes and saying nothing. You can take all three with you in a full export.
Both exclusions are written into the code as named exceptions with the reason attached, so a future change has to argue with them rather than quietly complete the list.
Apple Health
Two-way, and only with the permissions you grant — iOS asks per category and you can change your mind in the Health app at any time.
- HealthApp reads
- Steps, distance, active and resting energy, heart rate and HRV, sleep, workouts, exercise and stand time, body measurements, nutrition, State of Mind, and vitals where iOS allows.
- HealthApp writes
- Workouts, weight, water, mindful minutes, meals, and your daily mood as a State of Mind sample.
- Sleep is read-only
- HealthApp reads sleep from Health and never writes it back, so whatever your watch or ring recorded stays the source of truth.
- The full picture
- Every category HealthApp reads and writes, and the two places the connection deliberately stops.
- Nothing is implied
- Denying a category disables the feature that needs it. It does not silently fall back to an estimate.
Other connections
Each one is optional, each one is off until you turn it on, and each is disclosed in the privacy policy.
- Oura
- If you connect a ring, HealthApp reads readiness, sleep and activity scores, temperature deviation, HRV, sleep stages and workouts. Tokens are stored on the device. Disconnecting stops the sync. What it asks Oura for.
- Open Food Facts
- Barcode scanning looks the product up in the Open Food Facts database. The barcode is sent; nothing about you is.
- AI features
- Pro only, because each call costs us money. Requests go to Google Gemini through a proxy and are capped at 25 a day. What is and is not sent is in the privacy policy.
- Purchases
- Handled by Apple. Subscription status is managed through RevenueCat — we never see a card number.
When you move to a new phone
Sign in on the new device and the app pulls your backup down.
- Comes back
- Everything in the list above — your habits, meals, sleep, workouts, mind and sleep history, medications, what you earned, and the chapters already written for you.
- Does not come back
- Route history, cycle history and your private zones, for the reasons above. The app will tell you how many zones to re-add.
- Apple Health data
- Comes from Health itself, not from us. If your new phone has your Health data, HealthApp reads it again once you grant permission.
- Or take it with you
- You do not have to rely on the backup at all. Download My Data in the Me tab writes every entry to a JSON file — including route and cycle history, the two things the cloud copy leaves behind. An export is written on your phone and handed to the share sheet; it never passes through us.
- Deleting instead
- Deleting your account from inside the app removes the cloud copy as well as the local one. How to delete.
Your data, and a straight answer about where it is.
Local first, a backup you control, and two things that never leave the phone at all.