On December 19, 2008, a small app called iHeart appeared on the App Store. The App Store itself was barely five months old. This December, iHeart turns eighteen — and it is still here, still updated, and still made by the same one person. I wanted to take a moment to look back at how we got here, and to say thank you.
2008: a pulse reader on the first iPhones
The first iHeart measured your pulse with the sensors the iPhone had at the time. It could feel your pulse through your hand with the accelerometer, or listen for it with the microphone — even the one in the Apple earphones, pressed under a fingertip. Camera support came later.
I filmed these short tutorials back then, and they are still here — a small time capsule of those early days:
2009–2010: one app for every vital
People started asking for more than heart rate, so the family grew, one health measure at a time:
- iGoal for weight and fitness goals — August 2009
- BGluMon for blood glucose — February 2010
- BTMon for body temperature — March 2010
- BPMon for blood pressure — April 2010
- BCMon for cholesterol — June 2010
The idea has never changed since: a focused, dependable app for each thing you need to track, with charts that make sense and reports you can hand to your doctor.
Growing up with the iPhone
Every year brought a new iPhone, a new iOS and new expectations. Version 6 in 2012 added the wheel input mode, and early 2013 brought better support for users around the world. When Apple Health arrived with iOS 8 in 2014, the apps learned to sync with it. In 2017, version 10 arrived together with the rest of the Plus editions (iGoal Plus has been around since 2009) — the story of why there are two versions of each app is in Pro vs Plus.
2024: rebuilt from the inside
Version 14, released in the summer of 2024, was the biggest change since the beginning: more than 100,000 lines of Objective-C rewritten in Swift, with a refreshed design and improved reports. The one rule during the whole rewrite was that nobody would lose a single reading — some of you have years of history in these apps, and it all came along.
The latest update, 14.4, improves real-time sync with Apple Health, stops duplicate readings when both your iPhone and Apple Watch record the same measurement, and adds popular date formats for reports and exports.
What hasn't changed in eighteen years
- Your data is yours. It stays on your device and in your own iCloud. It is never sent to me, and the apps do not collect usage analytics. The details are in the privacy policy.
- Your history is kept. Through every rewrite, every new iOS and every new device, the data you entered years ago is still there.
- A real person answers. There is no support team — when you write to [email protected], I read it. Plenty of improvements in the apps started as one of your emails.
Thank you
Twelve apps, six health measures and more than 656,000 downloads later, the best part is still hearing from you. One App Store review from 2011 was simply titled “Luv the graph.” Another, from 2020, came from someone who had been using BGluMon “for quite a few years” — and whose doctor liked the reports so much she wanted the app for herself. Messages like these are why these apps are still going.
So here is to the next chapter. If there is something you would like to see in your app, or a story about how it has helped you, I would love to hear it.
— Anatoly