ALTE Is Out

For the past few months, everything I've written here has been about a problem. Data scattered across four apps that barely acknowledged each other. Hydration that wouldn't sync. Weight that came in from a smart scale and then sat there, disconnected from everything else. The slow creep of health tracking into something that felt less like a tool and more like a second job I hadn't applied for.

The other half of that has finally shown up. ALTE is on the App Store.

It's strange to write that sentence after months of writing around it. For a long time this was a thing I was building, which is a comfortable place to be, because a thing you're building is always going to be better next week. At some point you have to stop and let people use what actually exists.

One App Instead of Four

ALTE is a health tracker for iPhone and Apple Watch. Food, workouts, sleep, water, weight: the whole picture in one place, syncing to Apple Health the way it should have all along, and syncing across your own devices without you having to think about whether it worked.

That last part deserves more credit than it usually gets. Getting data to appear correctly on a second device, reliably, every time, took a genuinely surprising share of the last several months. It is the least visible work in the app and it was the hardest, and when it's done right nobody notices it at all. That seems to be how infrastructure goes.

The rest is the collection of small things I kept wishing for. Strength logging that catches your PRs on its own, so you're not keeping a running leaderboard in your head between sets. Barcode scanning for packaged food, and photo recognition for everything that doesn't come with a barcode. You point your phone at dinner and it works out the macros. Planning mode, which I've written about before, for making tomorrow's decisions while you still have the perspective to make them well. Sleep, so the bad night that wrecked Thursday's workout is something you can see instead of something you vaguely suspect.

None of that is revolutionary on its own, and I've never pretended otherwise. There was never going to be one feature that fixed this. The point was to stop needing four apps and a tolerance for duplicate entries.

Why It's a Paid App

ALTE costs money. There's a free trial, and after that it's a subscription.

I thought about this for a long time and I'll write about it properly at some point, because the reasoning is more interesting than the decision. The short version is that I'm one person, there are no ads in this app, and I am not in the business of selling anyone's health data to anyone. Those three things have to add up somehow, and a subscription is the arrangement that lets them. It's what keeps ALTE independent, and what makes it possible for me to keep working on it rather than moving on to whatever pays.

This Is Version One

I've been using ALTE every day for months. It's the only tracker on my phone now, which is the highest compliment I know how to pay it, and also the reason I trust it enough to put it in front of other people.

But it's version one. There are bugs in it I haven't found yet, because there always are. There are things I wanted to include that didn't make it, and things I'll only understand are missing once people who aren't me start using it. Data export needs to be fuller. There's more I want to do on the Apple Watch.

That list will change, and it should. I built this around the way I track, which is a reasonable place to start and a poor place to finish. If you use it and something gets in your way, tell me. The feedback link in the app comes directly to me, because there's nobody else for it to come to.

If any of these posts sounded familiar to you, the three apps and the spreadsheet, the barcode scanning at ten at night, the sense that keeping track of your health had quietly become its own chore, then this is the thing I built so it would stop.

Get ALTE on the App Store

Thanks for reading along.