ALTE 1.4.0: Fasting, Backups, and Building the App I Want to Use

ALTE 1.4.0 is here, and this update adds two features that have been on my list for very different reasons: intermittent fasting and Backup & Restore.

One comes directly from my own health and weight-loss journey. The other comes from spending my career in IT and software development and knowing better than to blindly trust technology.

Both, though, fit into the same idea behind ALTE: I’m building the all-in-one health and fitness app that I want to use myself.

Intermittent Fasting, Now Built Into ALTE

As I’ve shared before, ALTE grew out of my own weight-loss and health journey. Over time, what I need from the app has changed, and lately so has my approach.

My weight loss has slowed down, which isn’t exactly surprising after losing a significant amount of weight. So I’ve been looking at some of the habits and strategies that have worked well for me in the past. One of those is intermittent fasting.

I’ve used intermittent fasting successfully before, and I’ve tried several dedicated fasting apps along the way. They worked, but I kept coming back to one question: why am I opening another app for this?

ALTE is already where I track my nutrition, weight, measurements, supplements, activity, health data, goals, and progress. It’s the app I open throughout the day to see how I’m doing. If I’m going to start tracking fasting again, the fasting timer belongs there too.

So now it does.

Fasting That Fits Into the Rest of Your Day

You can start a fast from your iPhone or your Apple Watch, pick one of the common schedules or set your own eating window for each day of the week, and watch the timer run on your Lock Screen, in the Dynamic Island, and on your watch face. Your fast is there when you glance at your phone, without opening anything.

I also wanted fasting to feel like part of ALTE rather than a separate feature tucked away somewhere, so your current fast appears throughout the app, including a quick view on Today and easy access to your full fasting progress.

The part I like most is the smallest one. Log a meal while a fast is running and ALTE offers to end the fast at that time. No switching apps, no entering the same moment twice, no timer still counting an hour after you’ve eaten. That one behaviour is the whole argument for building this into ALTE instead of downloading something else.

And because real life doesn’t always happen neatly on schedule, you can adjust your fasting times too. Forgot to start the timer when you actually stopped eating? Ended your fast earlier and didn’t log it right away? You can correct it.

My own approach to intermittent fasting isn’t about pushing for the longest possible fast. It’s about adding a little more structure to my day: being more intentional about when I stop eating in the evening, extending that overnight window when it makes sense, and still leaving myself plenty of time during the day to meet my nutrition and protein goals.

That’s also how I wanted fasting to work in ALTE: as another tool, not another rule.

Because Technology Occasionally Has Tantrums

The other major addition in 1.4.0 is much less glamorous. It may also be one of my favourite features.

ALTE now has full Backup & Restore.

I work in IT. I’m also a software developer. If those two things have taught me anything, it’s that technology is wonderful right up until the moment it decides not to be. Devices fail. Software has bugs. Syncing can go sideways. Things get accidentally deleted. Technology occasionally just wakes up and chooses chaos.

And when you’ve spent months or years building a history of your health data, “Oops” isn’t a particularly satisfying recovery strategy.

So once a day, ALTE quietly saves a copy of everything you’ve logged to your own iCloud Drive. You don’t have to remember to do it, and the backup sits in your storage, not mine.

Apple Health can hand some of this back if the worst happens. It can return your weight and your workouts. It can’t return your recipes, your custom foods, or your templates, and those are the things you’d genuinely have to rebuild by hand. A backup can.

Restoring is deliberately gentle, too. It adds back what’s missing and leaves whatever is already there untouched, so putting a backup back isn’t a decision you have to brace for.

Hopefully, it’s a feature you’ll never actually need. But as someone who has spent a career dealing with technology’s occasional tantrums, I sleep better knowing it’s running whether I remember it or not.

ALTE Keeps Growing With My Journey

One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about building ALTE is that it isn’t based on a hypothetical idea of what someone might want from a health tracker. I use it every day. And as my own journey changes, I notice the gaps.

Sometimes that means a small quality-of-life improvement. Sometimes it turns into something much bigger, like Insights, supplement tracking, or now intermittent fasting.

The whole reason I built ALTE was that I didn’t want my health journey scattered across half a dozen different apps. So when I decided intermittent fasting was something I wanted to bring back into my routine, the answer became pretty obvious.

I didn’t need another fasting app. ALTE needed a fasting timer.

And now it has one.

Welcome to ALTE 1.4.0.