Announcing Gyroscope V3
Now on the Apple Watch! What’s your Health Score?
We’re excited to launch our third major update to the Gyroscope app. It includes the new Watch app, official launch of Health Score, a new tracking tab to capture everything about your life, and much more.
It’s now available for free in the App Store: just search for “Gyroscope” or install it from this link.
Get Gyroscope on your wrist
If you know someone who has an Apple Watch and wants to track their health, send them a link to the app!
The new app shows the four corners of your health, and in the middle you can see how they all add up with the new Health Score. At the top you can see what time it is, and at the bottom how you’re doing compared to your friends.
The new Watch app makes it easier than every to stay aware of your Gyroscope stats, and encourages healthy habits like meditation and workouts. While testing the app, we’ve accidentally been meditating and working out much more than ever before. We think this will make a huge impact in people’s lives.
Seeing the time for the day at 0 min is a huge motivator to fill it in, and the easy tracking makes it quicker than ever to start. Tracking mood is also easier than ever, with the simple mood cards now available in the watch app to log your current mood in less than 10 seconds!
It’s really easy to set it up!
The new Watch app is available to everyone for free as part of the Gyroscope V3 update! To install it, just update to the latest app version and it should show up automatically on your watch as well. If not, you can install it on your watch from the Apple Watch app on your phone.
Mental health is as important as physical
Now you can track your mood both in the app and on the watch, making it easier than ever to keep in touch with your emotions and see how they change over time.
Tracking the mood serves many purposes: it adds data to your account so you have a better history, but also is an opportunity to be mindful about how you are feeling and take a minute to analyze your emotions.
If you’re not happy with the results, it also gives you a feedback loop to make changes. If your mood score is low—perhaps you’re feeling anxious or angry lately—one of the best ways to deal with that is by meditating or going for a workout, both of which can be done directly in the app now.
Meditation is for everyone!
We think everyone should meditate, so we’re making meditation tracking available for free to everyone on Gyroscope (previously it required Pro).
You can sync it from a variety of meditation apps, or track it directly with the new Apple Watch app!
Choose an amount of time you want to sit for, or start an open session and end it whenever you’re done. Close your eyes and meditate however you like, or practice mindfulness while looking at the animation and use it as a reminder to breathe in and out.
Once you get started, you can set a weekly goal in the app to remind you to meditate for a few minutes every day.
Add the Gyroscope complication!
The app also includes a complication that can be added to your favorite watch face. It gives you constant access to your Health Score, and also let you very easily reopen the Gyroscope app just by tapping on it!
Are you ready to play?
What we call things plays a big role in how we think about them and communicate to others. “Working out” sounds really boring, so it’s no surprise most people avoid it and would rather watch Netflix instead. When kids run around on a playground, that isn’t because they’re trying to hit their 10k steps goal — they do it because it’s fun, and humans are built to play.
We’re now renaming that category in the app from “workouts” to “play” and we think it will change how people think about exercising. We encourage everyone else in the industry to start doing the same.
All of the popular exercise options
Now that we’ve synced millions of different workouts, we’re able to see which are the most popular types and build those directly into the app.
Activities that can’t be tracked elsewhere, like dancing, running on a treadmill, using a Peloton or a spin class can now be selected in the app. All the popular sports can also be chosen—including soccer, basketball, baseball, football, and many more. These will show up in your Gyroscope workouts afterwards with all the associated details and heart rate.
What’s your VO2Max?
One more thing… using the outdoor running or cycling tracking will also automatically measure your VO2Max. You can now see in the app and on the trends view online.
New simplified navigation of your life
In addition to all the new Apple Watch features, the iPhone app has been dramatically improved and reorganized.
We’ve added a lot of features over the last few years, and now they have all been streamlined to work together. Everything you need to track and improve your health is now contained in 5 simple tabs.
The tabs are now organized by objective: review today’s stats, track your activities, improve your health, get notified about new changes, and play with your friends.
Light or Dark?
The light and dark modes have also been improved, with a full-white tab nav and the classic Dark mode. The light mode now changes the tab navigation and is the most readable outdoors, while dark mode looks best on the new OLED displays and uses less battery.
New tracking experiences
Places is just one of the many trackers we’ve built in the last few years. Now you can see all of the tracking options in the same place and easily keep them up to date!
If you’re not yet tracking your mood daily, now is a great time to start. Filling in as many items as possible and keeping them up to date every day will help make your Health Score as accurate as possible.
Things that aren’t tracked yet can be easily input or set up, and you can see simple graphs and history for the things that are already being monitored. At the bottom, you can see your connected devices and set up new integrations that haven’t been added yet!
The classic Places and Travel experience is now easily available by tapping the map at the top. There is also a new simplified UI for going through the unidentified places and naming them, making it easy to find them without having to scroll through a long timeline.
Get actionable insights each day!
What is the whole point of tracking this? It is easy to get caught up in the details and lose sight of the big picture. Now the app is much more actionable!
The first thing you see when opening the app is your main goal, whether it is losing weight or getting stronger, a daily list of objectives to reach your weekly goals, and a reminder of what you set out to accomplish at the beginning of the year.
At the top will also be a plaintext description of what happened that day. All of the graphs and data are still available below, but no longer necessary to just get a quick understanding of what is happening.
Set your resolution
We had a lot of very excited users sign up on January 1, that have just a few months later lost their motivation or totally forgotten about what their goal was. There are so many other things to deal with and competing for attention, that this is understandable.
But we think this can be avoided with the right tools and reminders. Now your resolution (and you can keep changing it, of course) is shown at the top of the app every day, so you can go all year without getting off track.
You can set it in the Improve tab of the app. We suggest making it something actionable. For example, rather than “lose weight” or “be healthy” (which are great ideas, but hard to do daily) how about “Don’t drink any soda”, “Do yoga daily” or “Meditate every day.”
Play with your friends
Life is a game that we’re all playing. The new Play tab lets you compete with your friends and see how you compare.
The new feed lets you see reports and cards from everyone to stay inspired and show off your progress. Any time you go on a workout or get a new report, you can now share the card with your friends. Even if you don’t have many friends in the app, you can see what the community is up to.
New cards come in every few hours, so there is always something new to check out here. If your company is on Gyroscope, then you’ll even be able to see the company dashboard and compete with your coworkers in this section!
Improvements to existing features
Improvements to Sleep syncing
Some apps, especially AutoSleep, had issues with syncing to Apple Health. If wrong data was synced first, future changes didn’t always get picked up—which resulted in missing content or invalid data. We’ve added some new fixes so the data will now sync accurately and match in Gyroscope!
Strava Workout Duplication Fixes
Now that we sync running and cycling from many different sources — like Strava, our Apple Watch app, the Workouts app on the watch, and other apps that save to Apple Health — people who are tracking the same workout multiple times can get duplicate data.
This caused some problems with Strava syncing, because they also copy workouts to Apple Health. Now those will only show once, and the duplicate copy from Apple Health will be hidden automatically without any manual work.
Low-battery mode
We’re constantly optimizing the app to use as little as possible, while still downloading and syncing all of the content and showing great reports. Background tracking uses some energy, of course, but most of the power is used by having the app open, viewing reports and downloading the latest data, etc.
A new Pro feature, at the bottom of the customize screen you can choose to hide all of the app UI temporarily. This switches the app to a lower-power background mode by hiding all of the reporting, downloads and other features in the app.
For most people, this won’t be necessary but if you are paranoid about battery usage but still want to do all the constant tracking, this can give extra control over the usage. It can be useful if you are on a trip or are worried about battery, but don’t want to fully disable Places.
See Instagram photos in the app
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Adding photos of important moments of your life is a powerful and convenient way to add some more details to your tracking besides just the raw stats, without the work of writing out a whole journal entry.
We sync photos from the Instagram integration. These photos are shown in the new tracking tab, on the website, in the weekly reports, and now also at the bottom of your daily report!
Huge fonts
The app is now more readable than ever, especially with the new light-mode option. For maximum readability, we recommend the “Simple” reports theme, which has the biggest stats and numbers.
If that isn’t enough—especially for people who are older or have trouble reading small text—the font size can be increased even more in your iPhone system settings. It may not look as nice as the original layouts, but it will be extremely gigantic and easy to read.
How to use the app to live longer
The new Improve tab gives you everything you need to understand and start improve your health. See where you stand, and then set simple weekly goals to help you keep improving your stats.
What’s your Health Score?
Gyroscope has a lot of graphs and numbers to check, but we’ve simplified the experience so the only thing you really need to think about is your Health Score.
We’ve been testing and improving it for the last year, and it is now officially released and a core part of the Gyroscope Pro experience. It is the most life-changing feature we’ve built, and we think everyone should check it daily.
The more data you connect to the app and the more history you have, the more accurate it becomes. Connecting your DNA from 23&me will make it more powerful as well, and tailor the analysis to your particular body rather than just the general average. If you wear an Apple Watch or Oura ring at night, it can even warn you when you’re more likely to get sick.
Your latest score can be seen in the Improve tab, and also on the website and on the Apple Watch!
Get the V3 app update in the App Store now.
Try it out and let us know what you think of the update!
And help us spread the word while keeping your loved ones healthy. If you know someone who has an Apple Watch and wants to track their health, send them a link to this post.
Special thanks to Adam Tootle, Mahdi Yusuf & Shane Mielke for their tireless work on this release for the past many months!
