Why one app

Most people end up with three apps: something for food, something for the gym, and something for runs. None of them knows about the other two, so none can tell you that the week your lifts stalled was the week you ate four hundred calories under your target, or that the run you felt terrible on followed three nights of five hours' sleep.

What the coach is, and isn't

It reads a summary of what you have actually logged — your targets and body details, your recent food, your workouts and routines, your water, your runs and walks and your weight trend — and, from Apple Health if you allow it, your steps, active calories and sleep. So it answers about you rather than in general, and its answers come with buttons to do what it suggests.

It is not a doctor or a dietitian. It is built on general guidance and it can be wrong. Anything medical — an injury, a condition, a medication, an eating disorder — is for a professional, not an app.

Where your data lives

Everything you log is written to your phone first, so your diary, your history and a run in progress need no connection at all — runs record by GPS, which needs no data. The 10,647 foods built into the app search with no signal too. Searching for anything else, scanning a food, the map drawing itself and asking the coach are the parts that have to go and ask something, and those need the internet.

While you are signed in, your food, workouts, runs, weigh-ins, water, saved foods and meals, routines, the exercises you made yourself and your plan are also copied to your account, stored in London, so a new phone or a reinstall gets them back instead of starting empty. Your coach conversation stays on the phone either way.

What that covers, who it passes through and how long any of it is kept is set out in full in the privacy policy — written from what the code really does, not from a template.

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