Smartcuts

One action for the Shortcuts app: your steps for a day, as the same number the Health app shows.

Your iPhone counts your steps, and so does your watch or that health app you installed a while back and forgot about. The Health app knows they counted the same walk and shows you one number. The Health Samples Shortcuts action does not, and either sums everything together or only shows one source. Painful if your watch ran out of battery or you left your phone at home for a walk with the dog.

Smartcuts is a tiny app that gives Shortcuts one action: Get Daily Total. It asks Health for the day’s total and hands your shortcut a number. Everything else happens in Shortcuts.

What the action takes

Metric: Steps, walking + running distance (km), active energy (kcal) or flights climbed.
Date: Any time on the day you want. Leave it empty and you get yesterday. A day is a calendar day in the time zone your phone is in, and a walk across midnight is split between the two days, the way Health does it.
Sources: Only count these apps and devices: your watch alone, say, or everything but one app. Leave it empty to use every source.
Combine: Deduplicated merges the sources by your Data Sources order, and matches the Health app. Highest Source is the one source that recorded the most. Average of Sources is the mean of the sources that recorded anything that day.

Some ideas what you could do with that…

Write yesterday’s steps into your diary or a spreadsheet every morning. Compare what your watch counted with what your phone did. Get a notification at nine in the evening if you’re short of your number.

Things you should know about this app

The app itself is one screen with one button, the one that asks for access to your Health data. There’s no extra config needed. Inside the Shortcuts action you can select sources and how to combine (or not) them.
If the action returns 0 for a day you know you walked, check Settings › Health › Data Access & Devices › Smartcuts. iOS doesn’t tell an app that reading was declined; it reads as nothing recorded.
After a restart, Health data is locked until you’ve unlocked the phone once.
It needs iOS 26, and it’s for the iPhone.

TestFlight

Coming soon. The link will be on this page.

Privacy policy

The short version

Smartcuts reads four things from Health, when your shortcut asks, and only reads.
It stores nothing, and it never goes online.
No account, no server, no analytics, no trackers, no advertising.
I never see your data. Nothing in the app could send it to me.

What it reads

Step count, walking + running distance, active energy and flights climbed, and the names of the apps and devices that recorded them, so you can choose between them. iOS asks you for each of the four, and you can change your answer at any time in Settings › Health › Data Access & Devices › Smartcuts. Smartcuts cannot write to Health and doesn’t ask to.

Where it goes

To your shortcut, as one number, and nowhere else. Smartcuts keeps no copy: no database, no file, no iCloud, no log. It has no networking code, so nothing leaves your phone through it.

What your shortcut does with the number after that is up to you, and to the actions you put behind it. The sources you chose for an action are saved in the shortcut, by the Shortcuts app, like its other settings.

What I collect

Nothing. If you install through TestFlight, Apple may send me crash reports and whatever feedback you choose to write, under Apple’s terms. Those don’t contain your Health data.

Questions

mikka@h15n.org. If this policy changes, it changes on this page.

Last updated 12 October 2026.