[HN Gopher] Show HN: Heart Rate Zones Plus - The first iOS app I...
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Show HN: Heart Rate Zones Plus - The first iOS app I ever developed
Author : tobias5
Score : 40 points
Date : 2025-04-28 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apps.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apps.apple.com)
| tobias5 wrote:
| I build this iOS app because I wanted to get an overview of my
| time in zones per week without checking zones after every workout
| manually - Now I'm looking for feedback.
|
| Description: Track time in heart rate zones. Track per day, week,
| month, 7 days and 30 days time period and how much time you spend
| in each zone. Set goals & visualize progress. Get details about
| heart rates zones of your workouts.
|
| Features: Custom time periods, Workout to zone attribution to get
| a feeling which sport attributed most to each zone, Multiple zone
| calculation methods, Set personal time goals for any zone,
| Workout breakdown
|
| Pricing: Free
|
| Privacy: Nothing is tracked or send somewhere. Data is just on
| your device.
|
| Any feedback and features request is appreciated.
|
| Download: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/heart-rate-zones-
| plus/id674474...
|
| Video of the app in action:
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-qtHxEdMEv0
| serial_dev wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! I really would have thought it's
| already part of the iOS built in apps!
|
| You mentioned it's your first app. Did you vibe code your way
| through it or did you heavily use AI?
|
| I played around with Swift SwiftUI and I felt that AI helped me
| a lot in contrast to my day to day job, humongous code base, I
| can't get AI to get those mythical 100x productivity gains,
| more like 0.37x, but for new projects it's been great, so I was
| wondering...
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _I really would have thought it's already part of the iOS
| built in apps!_
|
| Between the Apple Watch and Fitness app, you can see your
| heart rate zone during a workout, and then review workout
| heart rates/zones over time afterward.
| https://support.apple.com/guide/watch/view-heart-rate-
| zones-...
| tchock23 wrote:
| Sort of. You can only see your real-time heart rate on your
| phone when you're doing a cycling workout for some weird
| reason. Otherwise you have to awkwardly look at your watch
| if you're walking/running.
| mathgeek wrote:
| I was surprised that the watch is the awkward thing to
| look at for you, as I have always found a phone to be
| awkward to look at while working out in any way. Learned
| a new perspective today.
| ra7 wrote:
| This doesn't entirely help, but for most (if not all)
| workouts, you can set alerts for specific heart rate
| zones. Of course, this is very cumbersome to do per
| workout on the watch.
| yapyap wrote:
| 0.37x is slower
|
| From the vibe of your comment I assume you mean 1.37x
| switchbak wrote:
| > 0.37x is slower
|
| I don't think that's an accident.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Okay, admittedly I'm somewhat of a greybeard by this point...
| However... I thought that vibe coding was .... exactly
| heavily using AI...
|
| I know this not the place; but what exactly is your
| definition of 'vibe coding' since you've used it with such
| confidence in your comment perhaps you can enlighten this
| programmer..
| tchock23 wrote:
| Nicely done! UI is clean and I really like that you give
| different options on how to calculate the zones since most apps
| just take the simplified % of max HR for zone calculations.
| jpc0 wrote:
| More an organisational thing but, what is the long term
| sustainability plan for this project. Apple Developer Program
| isn't free and apple isn't exactly well known for keeping
| stable APIs.
|
| If the answer is "until I don't want to do it anymore" that is
| perfectly fine but then can there be a commitment to open
| sourcing (if it isn't already) when you make that decision?
| throwanem wrote:
| I seriously doubt Apple will casually abandon HealthKit. They
| are not Google, and I'm sure the contracts underpinning MFi
| and similar marks for major partners have savagely punitive
| terms that would enable those partners to recover in any such
| case.
| jpc0 wrote:
| Not what I was referring to, hope this clarifies but apple
| seems willing to change the API which would require dev
| time to implement, ie this isn't a project you can stick on
| the app store and ignore, it will require continuous effort
| and cash to keep there and compatible.
|
| As an individual developer is the owner of the app and code
| I just want to know if the app will still exist in a year
| and be functional, otherwise I am not interested regardless
| of me liking the app idea.
|
| If OP would like to charge money or accept donations or
| whatever they would like to do that is fine, but right now
| those questions are unanswered.
| throwanem wrote:
| Okay, all granted, but no other than totally trivial
| project can really be "[stuck] on the app store and
| [ignored]," not for more than a couple years. Anything
| with meaningful platform integration would impose the
| same requirement, not to mention the $100 pa vig and time
| investment required just to show up at the party. In
| 2025, for something whose basic concept is obvious and
| the differentiator is polish, I don't see this as a
| tremendously reasonable showstopper the way you're
| treating it, even for a first time dev.
|
| "Assume good faith" and that. Fair to ask, but show the
| courtesy due an equal at least until it is evident that
| is unwarranted. This engineer has done work demonstrating
| they are at least my equal and I am not prepared to treat
| them otherwise only because I have not seen them do so
| before. The 32/64 bit and Intel/Arm transitions should be
| enough warning for anyone and lie well within living
| memory.
|
| Someone may cavil over "polish," I suppose. I have a
| 5-quart 'Artisan' Kitchen-Aid stand mixer in lavender,
| because that sets off my kitchen decor and I impose light
| enough duty on that machine to make aesthetics a
| reasonable figure of merit. This app is not that kind of
| machine. Who cares what color the cover plates are, when
| the target audience will never run the machine with them
| installed anyway?
| throwanem wrote:
| I like this visualization! I'm not doing a kind of training
| these days where it would be useful for me, but I wish I'd
| known about something like it when I was.
|
| Do you support Apple watch? I never actually targeted that or
| owned one (I like a much more stylish smartwatch!) and thus
| don't immediately know how to spot that integration on an App
| Store detail page, hence the need to ask. But I get the sense a
| lot of folks who _do_ train seriously like to do that with an
| Apple watch as primary or only device, and I could see enough
| utility in getting something like this kind of view in
| effective real time, to make the integration possibly worth
| considering. (If not already present! Or who knows, maybe Apple
| watches natively do that and now I know what the "heart rate
| push" feature on mine is imitating... ;)
| bryan0 wrote:
| The Apple watch Workout app has a heart zone view while
| you're working out, but I don't think it has a workaround
| summary of how much time you spent in each zone.
| pbreit wrote:
| Can an iPhone app figure out your blood pressure (with
| sufficient reliability)?
| kube-system wrote:
| ... if you connect a blood pressure monitor, yes.
|
| This app isn't figuring out your heart rate with just the
| phone's hardware. It is displaying heart rate data from Apple
| Fitness, which comes from heart rate sensor data (e.g. the
| one on an Apple Watch)
| brandonb wrote:
| Not now, but future Apple Watches are rumored to track blood
| pressure through analysis of pulse transit time:
| https://www.empirical.health/blog/apple-watch-blood-
| pressure...
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I can't tell from reading the listing if this is a feature or
| not, but if not, you should add the ability to set custom targets
| that match your real heart rate zones rather than relying on the
| naive population estimators that Apple gives you, along with more
| important metrics like LT1 and LT2 thresholds and VO2 max.
| Ideally, this would be a feature of the exercise tracker itself,
| but getting it in a data rollup app is better than nothing.
| nikitoci wrote:
| The ability to set max heart rate manually would be appreciated,
| neither of five available formulas provide accurate estimates at
| least for me.
| maperz wrote:
| Congratulations on your first App! I like the clean design and
| the simple configuration.
|
| I would love to have a widget that shows my progress in the
| zones. Ideally this could be configured to e.g. only show
| progress in Zone 2 if thats my current training goal.
|
| Keep up the good work and thanks for sharing!
| ra7 wrote:
| Looks clean!
|
| Does the Health app not allow you to automatically grab resting
| heart rate and max heart rate? I'm not sure why I would manually
| set those values in settings when they are already tracked in
| Health.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I would prefer an adaptive approach where the user also enters
| perceived difficulty and the app learns the correlation between
| heart rate and perceived difficulty to figure out the zones. I
| consistently have high heart rate during exercise: a normal walk
| might get my heart rate to 130, and a moderate run (10:30/mile)
| might get my heart rate to 180. A very fast run gets my heart
| rate to 215 (this is beyond the max measurement of the Apple
| Watch which is 210bpm; I had to use a Garmin HRM to get this
| measurement). I don't really trust the zones information iOS
| calculates by default, and it seems like I also can't trust the
| zones in this app. Switching to the Karvonen method makes the
| numbers look believable, but I'm not sure where the intensity
| comes from.
| wesgarrison wrote:
| This is great, congrats on shipping it!
|
| I like the interface but for the life of me I think I should be
| able to go back a period ("last week"). I think a week starts on
| Monday?
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| neat, I built something similar last year to help me learn
| SwiftUI: https://www.zone2.app
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(page generated 2025-04-28 23:00 UTC)