Gentler Streak Health Tracker 12+

I’m not a competitive athlete. I’m an old fart and just want an app to help me stay healthy as long as possible. GS helps me stay motivated by tracking a few personal health and exercise metrics. I’ve tried a bunch of the heavy hitters, but most of them are all about social media or flooded with ads. Gentler Streak is just about perfect for me. It track my bike rides, walks and stretching, yoga and strength training, encourages me when I’ve been lazy for too long and even yells at me when I overdo it. I only wish it would read a few other metrics from Apple Health and display them along with the ones built into the ‘wellbeing’ tab, but I guess if they did that for everybody the app would end up being a bloated mess. Still, 95% perfect and (though I despise suckscriptions) Gentler Streak is one of the few I’ll willingly pay.

** edit ** And congratulations on being recognized by Apple as a 2024 Design Award winner!

Hi! Thanks for taking the time to share your experience with Gentler Streak! We're thrilled to hear it proved so helpful to you and you like using it ☺️ Thanks for your support🧡 Wishing you a pleasant fitness journey, Vid and the Gentler Stories team

UPDATE: We still aren’t getting anything to show our steps as activity in this app. That’s a critical issue here. We shouldn’t have to log our daily steps as workouts to record the activity. I’ve tried doing this to have a more accurate picture of wellbeing and actually have the app saying I’m overreaching when it’s not that hard to walk throughout the day, taking breaks in between. Developers need to find a way to work this into the algorithm for the app. As it stands it seems that while other apps ignore the need for customization based on individual abilities/needs this app ignores the need to have basic data at its core. We need to meet somewhere in the middle here ASAP.
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I like the app but there are area it needs work; 1) The new Wellbeing tab and syncing with Health is good, but why doesn’t it show our steps? and why aren’t our streaks reflecting our walking throughout the day? This needs attention ‼️ 2) I’ve had to edit sleep in other apps as it over estimated my time sleeping. But then this app shows “Insufficient data” under the Wellbeing tab.🤨 The day is there? I just corrected it so that the record is accurate. This shouldn’t be a problem. 3) One of the reasons I’ve liked this app is the ability to do things at our own pace. I don’t like the “reminders” about exercising or losing a streak. A streak shouldn’t rely solely on workouts but also steps. See point 1.

Hello,

thank you for taking the time and leaving a review. We are indeed a work in progress. 😊

1.
a) Steps may become a part of Wellbeing if we find a sensible way to include them.
b) Your heart rate is the base for the TRIMP formula, which lies at the core of our algorithm. When you don't track your workout, we get very scarce feedback on it; therefore, we cannot estimate the toll it took on your body. The same goes for steps that appear as exercise minutes (if you use Apple Watch). We take it into account, but since heart rate data is not dense, we can't tell the strain it had on your body, therefore the effect on Activity Path is most probably not as great as it would be with full data. The Apple Watch reads your heart rate continuously every couple of seconds when tracking a workout, giving us great data to work with. When you are not tracking, your watch reads your heart rate every 2 to 5 minutes, getting up to 20 readings per hour at best.

2. This was a bug that was removed with the next version. If the problem still persists, please send over an email to support@gentlerstories.com and we will have a look into it.

3. Reply in the 1st point covers this. I agree this would be optimal, but it would not be backed with data, which then makes it messy. You could insert walking activity by hand, and do an equivalent of distance, and estimate your efforts with RPE. However, this is not optimal and we would suggest tracking as many workouts as possible, and with that getting quality data in, so we can guide you best as we can.