Apple Health
Health data gets stricter rules.
Apple Health holds the most personal numbers on your phone, so CalorieCounter treats them separately from everything else. This page says exactly what the app reads, what it writes, where those numbers go, and how to stop it.
The short version
- The app reads two things, each with its own switch: your weight and your active energy burned.
- The only thing it writes back is a weight you typed into CalorieCounter yourself. In this version it does not write your food or your water to Health.
- Health data is never used for advertising, never sold, and never shared with anyone else.
- It never goes into analytics, crash reports, or an AI prompt. A meal photo sent for an estimate carries no health data with it.
- All of it is optional and reversible. You can revoke every category in iOS Settings › Privacy & Security › Health, and the app carries on.
What the app reads
Nothing is read until you ask for it. Two places ask: Connect Health in Settings › Apple Health, and Read from Health on the Weight screen. Either one brings up Apple’s permission sheet, and that sheet is the only way in. There is no request during onboarding, and the app works perfectly well if you never connect it. Once connected, Read from Health in Settings has a switch for each category below. Both start on, and you can turn either off.
| Category | Why the app asks | What it does with it |
|---|---|---|
| Weight (body mass) | So you do not have to type a weight the phone already knows | Fills the weight list and the trend line on the Weight screen. It reads up to a year back and skips any reading it already has |
| Active energy burned | To see the movement your phone or watch already recorded | Shows as the day’s Active figure on Today, next to what you ate |
Neither one changes your targets. Your calorie and macro targets come from the details you gave in setup, and they move when you edit your goal, not when a weight or an activity figure arrives.
Apple’s permission sheet in this version also lists height and body fat percentage. Nothing in the app reads either one, and leaving them off changes nothing.
The app does not ask for steps, heart rate, sleep, workouts, cycle tracking, blood glucose, medical records, or anything else in Health, and it cannot read a category you have not granted. Apple never tells an app whether a read request was refused, which is what keeps a refusal itself private, so the app simply works with whatever arrives.
What the app writes
One thing: your weight. When you type a weight on the Weight screen, and you allowed the app to share weight when you connected Health, that same weight is saved to Health, so the two sides agree. It happens on the free plan and on Premium alike, and you can switch it off in iOS Settings › Privacy & Security › Health. A weight that came from Health in the first place is never written back to it.
Nothing else is written. Settings › Apple Health has a Premium switch called Food and water, and turning it on asks Health for permission to save dietary energy, protein, carbohydrates, fat, fiber, sugar, sodium, and water. In this version the app saves none of them. Granting that permission changes nothing you will see: no meal and no glass of water logged in CalorieCounter reaches the Health app. We would rather tell you that plainly than let you find an empty Nutrition tab.
So if you are looking at Health and wondering where your food went: it is in CalorieCounter, and only there. Your weight is in both.
What never happens to it
- It is never used for advertising or marketing, by us or anyone else. The app contains no advertising SDK.
- It is never sold, rented, or shared with data brokers, insurers, employers, or any other third party.
- No value ever enters usage analytics, even if you have opted in to analytics, and none appears in a crash report. The most analytics is told is that a sync ran and how many readings came across.
- It is never sent to an AI model. A photo estimate is made from the picture, the meal slot, your language, and the names of a few foods you logged recently; no weight, no activity, and no health history goes with the request.
- It is never used to train a machine-learning model, ours or anybody else’s.
- It is never used for data mining, research, or any purpose other than showing you your own numbers inside the app.
Where it actually lives
A value read from Apple Health becomes part of your CalorieCounter diary. A weight becomes a reading in the weight list, labeled as having come from Health. Active energy becomes one figure on that day’s summary, saved with the rest of that day. Both are held on your phone, and both are mirrored to your CalorieCounter account alongside the rest of the diary, so your history survives a new phone — for as long as “Store body metrics and diary in my account” stays on in Settings › Privacy and data. Switch it off and the mirroring stops and the copy in your account is removed.
That copy is yours, kept so the app can hand it back to you. The rules above still hold for it: it is not advertised against, not sold, not shared, not used to train anything, and never attached to an AI request. You can delete any weight reading from the Weight screen, export the lot from Settings › Privacy and data, and delete the account and everything in it from the same screen.
Apple Health keeps its own separate copy, and the two do not follow each other. Deleting a reading in CalorieCounter leaves Health untouched, and deleting a sample in Health does not pull back a copy that already reached your diary.
How to change your mind
- All of it, from iOS. Settings › Privacy & Security › Health › CalorieCounter. Every category has its own switch, for reading and for writing, and “Turn Off All” revokes the lot. The app cannot override this and does not ask again.
- From inside the app. Settings › Apple Health has a switch for Weight and one for Active energy under Read from Health. Turning one off stops the app asking for that category on the next sync.
- What stops. Revoking read access stops new values arriving; the app keeps whatever is already in your diary until you delete it. Revoking permission to share weight stops CalorieCounter adding new weights to Health; weights it already added stay in Health, because they are yours and only you can remove them.
Deleting what the app wrote
In the Health app, tap your profile picture, then Apps, then CalorieCounter, and choose to delete the data CalorieCounter saved. You can also delete single weights under Browse › Body Measurements › Weight, where each reading shows its source. Deleting CalorieCounter from your phone does not remove weights it already wrote to Health; Health keeps them for you until you say otherwise.
How long it is kept
- On your phone. As long as the app is installed. Delete the app and the local diary goes with it.
- In your account. Until you delete the entry or delete the account. Deleting the account queues the purge the moment you confirm it, and it finishes well inside 30 days.
- In Apple Health. Under your control, in the Health app, for as long as you want it.
- Anywhere else. Nowhere else. There is no other copy.
If you would rather not connect Health at all
Then do not. Apple Health is optional from end to end: every part of CalorieCounter works without it, you can type a weight by hand, and the app will not nag. Saying no is not a smaller version of the product.
Questions
Write to support@thecaloriecounterapp.com and a person will answer. If something on this page does not match what the app does, tell us and we will fix whichever one is wrong.