For years, Apple’s approach to fitness tracking centered on consistency, demanding you move the same amount every day or break your streak. That’s fine until life intervenes. Illness, burnout, or merely good and bad days can quickly make metronomic expectation feel more punitive than motivational.
A kinder and more realistic way to think about fitness is through trends. Not whether you did enough today, but how you’re faring over time, allowing more space for personal context. Are you holding steady? Gradually improving? Recovering from a rough patch? The bigger picture often matters more than a single off day.
This round-up starts with Apple’s Fitness app and then explores third-party alternatives that reinterpret your fitness data in ways that may better suit how you think, train, and recover, in order to best achieve your exercise goals.
Fitness (free)
Best for: zero-fuss access
The Summary tab in Apple’s built-in Fitness app does a good job outlining fitness trends at a glance. The familiar Activity Rings show the day’s progress, while metrics such as steps are highlighted on cards that you can tap to explore your progress over time.
The standout is the larger Trends card. Its year-on-year comparisons make it easy to see where you’re improving or slipping. Tap a metric and you’ll discover how Apple arrived at its conclusions and be able to compare recent form to your efforts over the previous year.
Tap the Trends header and Apple sorts metrics into what you’re doing well at and those that need attention, complete with advice in Apple’s nagging tone that underpins the company’s way of thinking about fitness: structured and prescriptive. But as a baseline, Fitness is solid and reliable.
Gentler Streak (free or IAP)
Best for: a human perspective
In contrast to Apple’s stern approach, Gentler Streak leads with empathy. It places you within a personalized training zone that reflects where you’re currently at and that adjusts dynamically based on recent activity and recovery. The app does encourage momentum but just as readily suggests rest if it thinks you’re pushing too hard.
The friendly vibe extends to recaps and overviews, which are visually clear yet richer and more flexible than Apple’s equivalents. A subscription unlocks deeper history and the Activity Path, which shows how your workouts have trended over recent days – and where they’re heading if you take a break.
This combination makes for an app that feels comprehensive yet personal, balancing long-term data and a focus on how you’re doing right now. If that matches your mindset, it’s an excellent fit.
Fitness Wrapped (free or IAP)
Best for: monthly round-ups
If you enjoy end-of-year wrap-ups, Fitness Wrapped applies the idea to exercise trends on an ongoing basis. Each month or year becomes a mini story, summarizing your accomplishments and consistency, comparing them with the previous period.
You can dig deeper into daily, weekly, monthly, or annual data, or explore everything logged since your earliest iPhone days. In all cases, highlights are provided, along with wiggly lines and bar charts that denote trends and patterns. The latter is particularly useful to spot days when averages slip. (Note: a subscription is required to unlock some historical views.)
This isn’t really an app about encouragement. Aside from gentle nudges in the Goals tab, it’s primarily about reflection. That makes it ideal if you think in blocks of time and like to ask yourself, “How did I do this month?”
Activas (free)
Best for: the AI-curious
This app has just two tabs and a focus on very recent data. You can switch between the last 7, 15, or 30 days, from which the app calculates your “momentum score,” based on your age, activity, and consistency. It can feel overly generous, so take that “excellent” badge with a pinch of salt if you’ve recently moved little!
What’s more interesting are the charts that cover recent activity, sleep, and vitals. And while some other apps attempt to extract meaning from such data, Activas lets you converse about them with a chatbot.
The insights can feel generic, but everything runs on-device and remains private. Activas is not a deep tracker, then, but it feels unique, and succeeds on its own terms, aiming to encourage progress over perfection. It’s also an intriguing glimpse of where fitness analysis is heading in a world of AI.
Peak (free + IAP)
Best for: at-a-glance widgets
Other apps offer widgets, but Peak effectively is a widget system. Within the app, widgets combine to form a dashboard that covers workouts, activity, vitals, and wellbeing. Metrics can be displayed in multiple ways, from raw numbers and recent trends to long-term graphics and color-coded personal benchmarks.
Despite the clean layout, Peak is flexible, letting you pin and reorder cards, deciding what remains front and center and what you can live with being a swipe away. Naturally, Peak’s widgets extend to your Home Screen, via a huge range of sizes and formats, including one option that crams in all your stats from the past week.
Home Screen widgets and some other features require a subscription or lifetime unlock, but even the free version is useful. And if widgets are how you prefer to consume data, Peak may well justify the outlay.
Streaks ($6/£6)
Best for: infusing habits
Streaks makes tracking a raw numbers game: did you do the thing or not? You create habits – exercise-related or otherwise – and mark them off by prodding a satisfyingly chunky button. The app can also track negative habits, if you’d prefer to log days when you didn’t exercise.
While the design is minimal, tasks are flexible. Rather than enforcing daily completion, Streaks lets you define goals like five days out of seven. Progress can be explored in a bespoke stats view or by tapping task buttons to cycle through mini calendars and streaks details.
Like Gentler Streak, this app offers a distinctly human touch. If you’re struggling, Streaks suggests lowering your target to stave off failure. Combined with the low one-off price, this makes Streaks a must-have if you’re keen to turn good intentions into consistent behavior.