liftbook

I got tired of bloated fitness apps. Most want an account, a profile and a tour before you can log one set. I wanted something about as fast as writing it down, and nothing else.

So the rule is "as simple as a notebook": black and white, a handwritten font, ruled lines, and as little as possible between you and the next set. It was also my first app to make it all the way into the App Store.

One page, one footer

A lift is a notebook page: a date, a title like "Push Day," and movements with sets of weight × reps. All the typing happens in one footer that rides on the keyboard and changes mode as you go. There's no save button; every submit writes through.

Suggestions from your own history

There's no exercise database. Titles predict your rotation: after Push, Pull, Legs, Push, it suggests Pull. Movements come from the last time you did that same day, and matching is by word prefix, so "inc pr" finds Incline Press.

Sets get no suggestions, just a line under the input: last time: 135x8, 140x6. That replaced something cleverer. The app used to find the tightest cluster of your working sets from last time, to filter out warmups and drop sets, and suggest weights around it. The plain note took its place when the charts landed.

Nothing leaves the phone

Every lift lives on the device as one JSON blob in AsyncStorage. No accounts, no server. liftStore.ts reads it once per launch, serves everything from memory, and writes back through a serialized queue so fast edits can't interleave.

That makes the phone the only copy, so the store is paranoid. A corrupt blob gets copied to a backup key before starting fresh, and if the backup or the read itself fails, the app runs in memory for that session and refuses to write.

Stack