Staying fit and maintaining a healthy lifestyle is essential for everyone. With the increasing use of smartphones, tracking health and sports activities through apps has become a popular trend. However, not all apps are open-source, and many require payment and force you to upload your health and exercise information to their servers.
I truly enjoy browsing the ever-growing collection of open-source apps for Android that are available on the F-Droid platform.
It’s fun to discover free alternatives to proprietary solutions. Sometimes, these free tools are on par or even better than the non-free apps.
In this post, I’ll share my favorite open-source apps for tracking health and sports activities that I use regularly.
MediLog
I discovered MediLog while searching for an app to keep track of my blood pressure measurements. It performs this task remarkably well, by minimizing the amount of taps required to capture the essential information and switching to the next input field automatically. The data can be exported in CSV format, which makes it easy to share and process it with other tools.
In addition to blood pressure, the app supports tracking the following values (but I currently don’t use these features):
- Blood sugar (glucose)
- Blood oxygen saturation (oximetry)
- Body weight / Body Fat
- Body temperature
- Water intake
- A simple Diary
OpenTracks
OpenTracks is a multi-purpose GPS tracking app that allows you to record your tracks while hiking, biking, or running while respecting your privacy. The app can track and display your speed, distance, and elevation in real-time. You can also view your tracks on a map and export them in various formats. Track data is stored locally by default, you decide if and how you want to share it with others.
There’s a separate add-on app called OSM Dashboard that visualizes the recorded GPS tracks on OpenStreetMap.
RunnerUp
I recently (re-)discovered RunnerUp as an alternative to OpenTracks, primarily because it’s the only fitness app that still supports my aging Sports Tracker HRM1 heart rate monitor. Currently, I use OpenTracks for tracking my cycling activity, and RunnerUp for running.
What I like about it is the built-in upload functionality to various services including plain WebDAV.
Feeel
Feeel is a fitness/exercise app that comes with a number of pre-defined training sessions, but it also supports creating custom training using a built-in collection of exercises.
As the app is written using Flutter, it’s available on both Android and Linux desktop environments via FlatPak.
I use their built-in 5 minute “Neck and shoulder stretches” workout while working on the computer and I created a custom 20 minute workout that I practice twice per week.