Some Mac users are interested in viewing their health, exercise, activity, and fitness data collected from their Apple Watch and iPhone on their Mac. Recently, Apple added the Health app to the iPad, so where is the Health app for Mac? That should be easy, right?
One might think so, but not so fast. While there are some potential solutions for viewing Health data on a Mac, you might be surprised that they aren’t exactly ideal or seamless.
Where is the Health app for Mac?
It turns out that there is currently no Health app on the Mac. So viewing Health data on a Mac isn’t as straightforward as it is on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch.
How Do I Get Health Data on Mac?
A potential remedy involves downloading the Health app on your iPhone and iPad (accessible from the App Store here) and running it on an Apple Silicon Mac, provided you can obtain the IPA file for the Health app.
Getting an IPA file is theoretically possible using tools like ipatool available if you have Homebrew on your Mac and are comfortable with the command line. It is also potentially possible to obtain the IPA file of the Health application using iMazing.
Once upon a time there was direct access to IPA files matter of using iTunes in macOS, but Apple has removed this option along with iTunes from modern versions of macOS, so you’ll have to rely on one of the other solutions instead.
All of this is theoretically possible for Mac users with Apple Silicon because Apple Silicon Macs can natively run iPhone and iPad apps and many people do exactly that, esp for playing games.
This simple fact makes it all the more curious why Apple hasn’t brought an official Health app to MacOS yet, as it could have allowed Mac users to easily run the iPad version, but perhaps that will change in time.
Are there third-party health apps for Macs?
Since there is no official Health app for Mac, and not every user will be interested in trying to run the iPad Health app on MacOS by extracting an IPA file from somewhere else, third-party apps offer another option.
There are also third-party tools and apps available to view health activity and fitness data on your Mac. However, many users consider health data to be particularly private, so not everyone is interested in using third-party applications to manage or explore their health information.
One third-party app that claims not to collect any user data is Hello Auto Export which runs on a Mac and enables users to both view their data and users can export the health data in JSON or CSV file formats.
Will Apple release a Health app for Mac?
It seems likely that Apple will eventually release a Health app for MacOS, especially since they recently brought it to the iPad.
A typical feature rollout in the Apple ecosystem usually goes something like this; the feature debuts on iOS for the iPhone, the feature then makes its way to the iPad about a year later as a major feature for iPadOS, and then arrives on the Mac in the next major system software release later. Of course, things don’t always follow this timeline, and it’s always possible that Apple may never release a Health app for Mac.