Healthy Shoes ‘Review’ – iOS

The iPhone app Healthy Shoes is released today. It is one of only a tiny handful of dedicated running shoe tracking apps for iOS. The benefit of a dedicated, 3rd party app is that you can use your favourite workout-tracking app for, err, tracking workouts and you are not tied to that same app’s shoe-tracking abilities.

Healthy Shoes follow the well-worn FREEMIUM app model where the basics come free and you pay if you want to expand your usage down the line with additional shoes.

How it works

The Healthy Shoes app uses the latest iOS 14 development tools to sync your Apple Health workout data and then tag both indoor runs and outdoor runs with a shoe. Simply, the shoe automatically accumulates miles as you run and you can manually change the shoes you’ve used too. Eventually, you are alerted once the shoe has reached the ‘target distance’ you believe it would be good for.

The app has a couple of nice touches that stand out to me. Firstly the app can be configured to automatically account for a mixed running schedule of indoors and outdoors runs, allocating different shoes to each. However, of most interest to me was the use of Apple’s Swift UI to create WIDGETS for your iPhone screens.

Here are some screens from the app and the first shows several widgets that I have set up on my iPhone. Shown is the standard ‘icon’ link to both the Healthy Shoes app and the Core temp app. The Healthy Shoes WIDGET is pretty cool and looks nice alongside the STRYD RSB widget and the 24×7 HR chart from Cardiobot. Although a widget stack is possible, it’s a shame that Apple doesn’t let you create widgets in folders as think most widgets contain information that we do not need to constantly see, maybe that feature will come this year with Watch OS8?

The developer, Samuel, also pointed out that you can have one widget per shoe which is pretty cool (not tested). So you can have one widget for your race day shoe and one for your ‘trainer’.

Must Read: Apple Watch 7 Review

Q: Does the Healthy Shoes app need the Apple Watch ?

A: No, the Apple Watch is not needed. Any popular app, including those on the Apple Watch or iPhone, will work eg these…

• Apple Watch workout app
• Apple Fitness+
• adidas Running
• Nike Run Club
• Runkeeper
• Strava

Here’s the link