The best health, diet and exercise apps for iPhone
Our favorite iPhone apps for keeping fit, workouts, reducing stress and relaxing.
Otter - Diet Diary
- $0.99/89p/AU$1.49
Otter - Diet Diary offers an interesting take on logging food. Most trackers in this space are fixated on statistics and calorie intake, which can be demoralizing and doesn’t necessarily help you to reflect on the right things. By contrast, Otter focuses on visuals and manual notes, making you think about your meals in a different way.
The idea is that each time you eat, you take a snap of your dish. You can add brief commentary and a rating. Optionally, you can add water intake, weight and calorie count to each day, but you don’t need to.
Otter’s primary goal is to become a scrollable visual presentation of your food intake. This can help you spot patterns and make better choices – and feels a lot more fun than staring at cold numbers and graphs.
Fit500
- Free + $4.99/£4.49/AU$7.99
Fit500 essentially sits atop Apple’s Health app, using its data and letting you dig much deeper into the numbers and statistics that matter to you.
Once the app’s given permission to access your data, you can create cards for your personalized dashboard. Each is based around comparisons across time ranges, summaries of workouts, or progress toward goals. A dozen pre-installed templates can also be imported to speed things along.
Cards can be edited, archived or deleted at will. Your settings also sync across platforms by way of iCloud, meaning you can get at your dashboard on an iPad or a Mac. Ideal stuff, then, for always having stats on hand when you want to peruse fitness trends to work toward new goals.
Kiff
- $3.99/£3.49/AU$5.99
Kiff wants you to throw out less food. To achieve this, the app helps you keep track of the fresh goodies in your kitchen. You can opt to scan a product into the app or type in its name. Add an expiration date and you can opt to have Kiff bug you with notifications up to three times throughout an item’s shelf life.
Kitchen and cookery apps sometimes offer similar features, but Kiff’s focus on this task gives it the edge. It’s a joy to use, and the bold, friendly interface is inviting. You’ll want to use it, rather than it being a chore. Smartly, the app includes a home screen widget as well, to leave you with no excuses when it comes to remembering which items will soon go bad.
Mela
- $4.99/£4.49/AU$7.99
Mela is a recipe app by the creator of RSS app Reeder – and it brings all of that app’s source tracking and interface smarts to a very tasty package. So although you can use a built-in browser to find recipes and then add them to Mela with a tap, you’re encouraged to subscribe to feeds of favorite websites. On doing so, you’ll never miss a new recipe from a favorite source.
On adding a dish, it sits in your Recipes tab and can subsequently be edited, shared and exported. There’s no fully baked tags system, but recipes can be added to a ‘want to cook’ list or user-defined categories.
Beyond that, there’s a groceries list that integrates with Reminders, and which can be populated with a tap from any recipe. With a mouth-watering interface, Mela is a most palatable premium recipe app for iPhone.
MeandR - Walking Workouts
- $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99
MeandR - Walking Workouts gives walkers a focused app for exercising outdoors – wherever they are. It begins with a challenge screen, where you define a route type (linear or loop), distance to cover (which includes a handy steps estimate), and average speed target. Kick things off and a route based on your local area is generated.
The app isn’t prescriptive. If you’re not happy with the route, you can adjust waypoints to avoid certain areas. Then, while walking, a progress screen shows if you’re on track. When you’re done, stats are logged, so you can later dip into your walks history and see how you’re progressing.
In all, this feels like a friendlier exercise app than most – one keen to let you take it easy, but not too easy, when taking steps to a healthier lifestyle.
Dark Noise
- $5.99/£5.99/AU$9.99
Dark Noise is a refined, premium take on ambient noise apps. At its most basic, it lets you trigger audio loops that can help you focus or relax – the likes of white noise, rainfall, and crackling fires. The interface echoes the best iPhone apps in its refinement and elegance.
But there’s also plenty of customization on offer. You can combine several sounds into a personalized mix, to which you can assign a custom icon. The interface can be tweaked, including the app’s colors and widget. There’s extensive Shortcuts support too, giving you the means to use Dark Noise as part of a bedtime routine.
There are of course plenty of freebies that offer similar core functionality, but none of them have the same level of class, polish, and care that is evident here, making Dark Noise well worth the outlay.
Moodistory Mood Tracker
- $4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99
Moodistory is a low-friction journal for tracking your mood. The idea is to note how you feel, and over time build up a picture of how your mood changes.
The app is low-effort. It doesn’t stress you out by adding to your load. If you like, you simply rate your current mood and leave it at that; should you wish to add context, basic journaling is available.
Over time, your input builds to fashion a grid-like color-coded calendar, and graphs that outline your mood distribution and average week. If it turns out you’re always unhappy on a Tuesday, perhaps there’s something on that day you can change.
With customization options, theming, and Apple Watch support, Moodistory is an excellent addition to any iPhone wellbeing toolkit.
Streaks Workout
- $3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99
Streaks Workout is an exercise app that marries immediacy and depth. To quickly kick off a workout, tap a time. The app will formulate a routine on your behalf, barking orders as exercises switch. Options range from the relatively easy six-minute ‘Quick’ to the frankly masochistic 30-minute ‘Extreme’.
When you have the time and inclination to plan, there are plenty of additional options. You can toggle specific exercises on and off, or add your own, stating how long a rep takes, and whether it should be timed or counted. Want an entire custom routine? That’s possible, too.
Continue to use Streaks Workout, and the app will log your history and streaks. You can set weekly goals, and the app links to Apple Health. It will even track workouts across devices should you start on an iPad or Apple TV. So now there’s no escape from getting fitter.
Cosm
- $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99
Cosm is designed to calm and focus your mind, through ambient audio composition – and journaling.
The music bit resembles Brian Eno’s Bloom app, with you tapping the screen to simultaneously play notes and have shapes appear from beneath your digits. Your taps coalesce into a semi-random repeating loop.
But Cosm differentiates itself from Bloom in key ways. There are multiple instruments to select (albeit from an awkward picker), and the option to define tuning. Also, there’s the writing bit.
This suggests you align soundscapes with how you felt when making them. But the text fields are blank, and so it’s down to you to decide how to use them – while Cosm gets on helping to make your mind a calmer place.
Paprika Recipe Manager
- US$4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99
Paprika wants your main companion in the kitchen to be your iPhone. With the app, you can store clippings from foodie websites. Recipes are intelligently saved offline, and can be edited. You can even add photos of your successes, thereby giving you something to aim for next time!
The app also supports everything else about mealtimes. You can create grocery lists, track what’s in your cupboards and when ingredients expire, plan meals that are synced with Calendar, and create reusable menus.
The app’s not the most vibrant in its class, and lacks the handy step-by-step imagery and videos found in the likes of Kitchen Stories and Tasty, but for getting on with the business of planning and making meals, on an ongoing basis it deserves the app equivalent of a Michelin star.
Streaks
- US$4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99
Streaks is a to-do manager all about helping you form good habits – and ridding yourself of bad ones. You begin by selecting a task and defining how often you want to do it. Tasks are subsequently checked off, and you can track your progress by way of the app’s various graphs and statistics.
Where Streaks succeeds is in the flexibility of the tasks you can add, and the razor-sharp focus on getting habits infused into your routine. The bold interface is ideally suited to six tasks, forcing you to prioritize. You can set reminders, and mark items as done using the Today widget or an Apple Watch.
Task types are varied. There are those that integrate with Health, negative tasks (like smoking) to avoid completing, and timed tasks for things like meditation sessions. In all, it’s an excellent app for coaxing out a better you.
White Noise+
- Free + $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 IAP
White Noise+ is an ambient noise machine, which aims to drown out distractions by filling your ears with something pleasant instead.
Rather than just offering you sounds to play, or sliders to adjust volume levels, it takes the form of a mini mixing desk akin to the smart drums grid in GarageBand. You drag sounds into the 16 available slots, with those towards the top playing at a louder volume, and those towards the right offering more complexity. It’s intuitive, effective and looks really great as well.
Neatly, should you happen upon a particularly pleasing combination, it can be saved for later playback, and the app itself includes a few examples to get you going. There’s also an alarm built-in, for using the app for meditation sessions – or to help you not oversleep when having a quick afternoon nap.
MyFitnessPal
- Free
MyFitnessPal aims to get you fitter by helping you track what you eat. Given that such tracking often involves logging meals, the app speeds things along by way of a barcode scanner, a colossal food database and a recipe importer. If you tend to eat the same meals often, you can save favorites.
All the while, your calories are tracked, and you can check how you’re doing against any goals you’ve set. The ability to connect exercise apps also means MyFitnessPal can become a kind of hub for your general wellbeing.
As ever, there’s a pro version. This seriously ramps up data, analysis and support, with the likes of nutrient insights, tips articles and fine-grained goals. In either incarnation, MyFitnessPal works well to help you more easily understand how food intake affects you.
