I shipped my first App Store app

September 2026 · Updated September 11 for version 1.1

The short of it is, I've been building stuff on the internet since the 90s (websites, a publishing company, a pile of homelab servers, scripts for whatever annoyed me twice) and I'd never shipped an iPhone app. That changed this month - HealthBridge: Easy Export is live on the App Store.

HealthBridge dashboard on two iPhones, light mode and dark mode, showing an Up to date status, the Push Health Data button, today's steps and a 14-day chart — The dashboard in light and dark mode. The green pill up top tells you when the last export ran.

Your phone has years of health data sitting in Apple Health - steps, heart rate, sleep stages, blood oxygen, weight and a lot more. Apple's built-in export hands you one giant XML file, which is pretty useless for most things. HealthBridge writes one small file per day instead, JSON or CSV, into any folder you pick in the Files app. Point it at iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive and your health history is just files you can actually use.

A few things people don't expect it to work with, since all it does is write files:

Obsidian. Point it at a folder inside your vault and each day's health file shows up in your notes. Obsidian reads files, that's the whole trick.
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. Export once, drop the file into a chat or a project folder, and ask about your trends.
Any cloud that shows up in Files. Box, Proton Drive, pCloud, Nextcloud over WebDAV. If it's in the Files app, it's a folder HealthBridge can write to.

I built it because I wanted my own data in a format my own scripts could read. Everything I found wanted an account, a subscription, or a server somewhere holding my health history. I didn't want any of that, so I wrote the tool I was looking for.

The privacy part is pretty simple: there's no networking code in the app. It can't upload your data anywhere because there's nothing in it that talks to the internet. Apple's privacy label reads "Data Not Collected", and nothing in the app is capable of collecting it, so the label takes care of itself. Whole thing is 1.5 MB.

HealthBridge first-launch screen with a close-up of its three points: one tap to export, private by design, and any cloud — First launch. Your data goes to a folder you pick, and that's the only place it goes.

The free version does the job. One tap exports any day and it backfills the days you missed. Pro is $4.99, once (no subscription), and turns on automatic background export, daily or hourly, so the files just show up, plus the weekly and monthly summary files.

HealthBridge Pro upgrade screen with a close-up of the Pro features: automatic background export, weekly and monthly summaries, daily or hourly scheduling, and a one-time purchase — The Pro screen. $4.99 once, and the files show up on their own.

New in 1.1

Version 1.1 went live on the App Store on September 11.

Weekly and monthly files. Pro can write one summary file per week or month, with each day's breakdown inside.
More metrics. Deep, REM and core sleep, blood oxygen, respiratory rate, resting energy and VO₂ max. Those join steps, distance, flights climbed, active energy, exercise minutes, resting heart rate, HRV, weight and sleep.
Share a copy. Export the last 7, 30 or 90 days as one file. Send it to your doctor, drop it into ChatGPT, or save it anywhere.
An alert if exports stop. It's optional. The app already shows your last good export and warns you when it goes stale, and now it can tell you too.
Reliability fixes. Background exports no longer save empty files while your iPhone is locked, and a day that already has data never gets overwritten with a blank one.

If you try it, shoot me a note and tell me what you're doing with the files. I'm curious what people build.

Jim

Get HealthBridge on the App Store