Why I Was Running Around My Kitchen at 10pm Scanning Barcodes

(And what it took to finally stop)

Health tracking should make your life easier. That's the whole point. You log the thing, the app does the thinking, you make better decisions. Simple.

What nobody tells you is that somewhere between your third app and your second failed sync, it stops feeling like a tool and starts feeling like a part-time job.

For a good stretch of my fitness journey I was juggling a small ecosystem of apps. One for nutrition. One for water, because the nutrition app and Apple Health had a complicated relationship when it came to hydration data. One for weight, because my smart scale synced beautifully to Apple Health but getting that data to play nicely with everything else was, let's say, inconsistent. Duplicate entries became a regular occurrence. The kind that make you question reality a little.

Fitness tracking was its own separate problem. The nutrition app had a fitness component, technically. It just didn't sync to Apple Health properly, didn't import from it reliably, and mostly seemed to exist to remind me it was there without actually doing anything useful.

So there I was, three apps deep, and none of them were really talking to each other.

The cracks started showing in the small moments. Miss a meal log during a busy day and suddenly you're standing in your kitchen at 10pm, phone out, scanning barcodes on things you ate eight hours ago, trying to reconstruct your day before midnight like some kind of nutritional detective. Do that enough times and the motivation starts to quietly drain away.

Eventually I gave up. Not on the journey, just on the apps. The friction had quietly accumulated past the point where the benefit outweighed the effort.

The timing was almost poetic. One of my subscriptions came up for renewal right around the same time. I added up what I was spending across all of them and realized the combined total was more than the cost of an Apple Developer Program enrollment. I'd been learning Swift for a while. I had an idea of exactly what I wanted.

The decision made itself.

What I actually wanted was simple in theory: everything in one place. Nutrition, fitness, weight, sleep, all of it, with the correlations and patterns that only emerge when the data is together. A weight trend that sits next to your sleep debt and your calorie balance tells a much more interesting story than three separate numbers in three separate apps.

I wanted data from Apple Health to actually import. Properly. Without duplicates, without gaps, without having to manually reconcile anything. I wanted logging to be fast enough that I'd actually do it in the moment instead of reconstructing it at 10pm.

And I wanted sleep to be more than a number. Alte calculates weekly sleep debt against your own goal, lets you rate your sleep quality, and ties that into insights alongside the rest of your health data. Because how you slept last night is relevant to how you feel, how you perform, and what your body needs. That context matters.

It took building my own app to get there. But I stopped running around my kitchen, so I'll call it a win.

Alte is currently in TestFlight. If you want to follow along, you're in the right place.

Interested in early access? Join the waitlist.