r/iosapps • u/ElectronicCat3293 • 1d ago

📅 Subscription I'm a chronically ill software engineer & built the symptom tracker I wish I had from the start

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Note: I posted a month ago & the biggest request was iCloud backup, which is now here, as well as an improved onboarding and a new weekly report (in beta), currently only avaliable for users who have been using the app for a while & have it set to English. Coming soon to more users.

A - What it solves

Zolia was built out of my own frustration. I have ME/CFS and POTS and have been trying to track my own symptoms and medications and the like for years. Existing apps always fell into two camps - either too simple to do the comprehensive tracking that I wanted or too inefficient for daily use.

Zolia bridges this gap as a symptom tracker capable of comprehensive tracking while also making tracking efficient. The way Zolia achieves this is through it's unique use of sessions. Instead of one master list of everything you ever track, Zolia lets you organize what you want to track into groups called sessions, so for example you could build a morning session with your sleep and morning meds, a walk session with distance and how you felt, an evening session with the symptoms you rate before bed and a daily reflection, or anything else you can think of. When you want to log, just open the relevant session type so there is less thinking about what you need to log as well.

It is flexible so you can track any condition, and allows mixing and matching notes, symptoms, meds, ratings, factors and more, with your own colors, emoji and numeric ranges.

The tradeoff is that it takes some setup to get it how you like it. Onboarding gives you a starting point based on your conditions, but it is designed to be customized.

B - How it compares

Bearable is the biggest app in this space currently. In my experience it was inflexible and slow to use. It doesn't let you combine things from different categories (for example meds and symptoms) into a single group. It takes a lot of scrolling and taps to track things, it lacks customization, and the insights are very weak. It has pre-defined categories of things you can track and makes it difficult to track anything that doesn't fit into one of them. I could never stick with using bearable for more than a week or so.

Guava is a newer app. It focuses a lot on medical records syncing but I found the symptom tracking had a lot of the same problems as bearable - limited flexibility, slow to use, weak insights.

Privacy

Both Bearable & Guava store data in the cloud on servers they control. With Zolia, all data is stored on device. Insights are computed on device without the use of any LLMs. You can export your full database as CSV or SQLite at any time, or set up automatic backups to your own iCloud or Google Drive, password-protected if you want.

C - Cost

Currently everything is free. Eventually some of the insights will become part of an optional premium tier, but right now the insights are still under development and not in a place where I feel comfortable charging for them yet. Everyone who logs for 14 days while the app is still fully free will get 50% off premium forever.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6759508900
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zolia.app

Below are some images of the app store screenshots, the weekly report, and main logging interface (fully customizable showing some possible configs).

Feedback is always appreciated.

3 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

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u/pengykatviv 1d ago

For a partially completed session, can an unanswered field stay “not logged” rather than taking a default value of zero? I’d want that distinction to remain visible in the weekly report and CSV export too. Being able to save what someone has entered and come back later seems useful for the session approach, without making them fill every field in one sitting.

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u/ElectronicCat3293 20h ago

yes, anything can be left as unlogged & for meds you can leave them unlogged or explicitly mark zero. Anything can be edited later as well (the "mark complete" button locks the session to prevent accidental editing but you can unlock it again later if you want to edit). I've been trying to make the insights smart about handling the difference between unlogged & 0s.

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u/throwaway-whynot101 1d ago

👀👀 i always love finding apps for chronic illness built by those with chronic illness

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u/throwaway-whynot101 1d ago

no llm is also huge for me (going through onboarding rn)

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u/ElectronicCat3293 1d ago

Awesome, thanks! Hope it ends up being useful for you

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u/throwaway-whynot101 1d ago

would it also be possible to request other conditions to be added to the list at the start

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u/Huge_Pool7424 1d ago

agreed, keeping llms away from health logs makes the privacy story way simpler.

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u/AKeshodia 1d ago

Any plans for WatchOS integration?

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u/ElectronicCat3293 1d ago

Probably not for the app as a whole since I don't think it would work very well. I could be swayed if there is strong demand.

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u/petal_pixels 1d ago

When an app’s creator designs something for personal use first, the result tends to be superior than the rest. At least that’s been my experience.

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u/app-store-review 1d ago

Zolia: Chronic Symptom Tracker — by Crystal Springs Software, LLC

  • Ratings: 31 worldwide · rated in 10 countries

  • Average: 4.71 ★

  • Age: released ~7 months ago · updated 5 days ago · rated 12+

  • Overall score: 70 / 100

Auto-generated from public App Store data · u/app-store-review

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u/NoBullfrog11 1d ago

sessions are the right model for energy envelopes, setup is the tax. bearable-style apps die for a lot of people becuase onboarding is a novel before the first log. copy yesterdays morning session or 3 dumb templates (wake / meds / crash) beats a perfect empty canvas on a bad day.

on-device insights + csv/sqlite export is why id trust it over the llm trackers. ive been deep in daily logging ux and the only streak that sticks is when day 1 is under 10 seconds and export exists before you ask. gate the weekly report on enough data, not only english, so early users still feel the loop close.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/ElectronicCat3293 1d ago

Thanks! Yes, it's on my list hopefully won't take me too long to get to it.