AlcoLog can write your drink data to Apple Health after each session ends. This tutorial walks through enabling the sync, what exactly gets written, how to confirm it’s working, and how the boundary works. The sync is one-way: AlcoLog can write to Health but cannot read from it. Apple Health sync is free on every plan. Your other Health data stays private to the Health app.
# Step 1. Open the Apple Health section
Tap the Settings tab and scroll down to the Apple Health section, just above Data & Privacy. The first time you visit, the Sync with Health app toggle is off.
Write drink data to Apple Health after each session ends.
# Step 2. Turn the toggle on
Tap the Sync with Health app toggle. iOS shows its native Apple Health permission sheet asking which categories AlcoLog can access. Four are requested, all write only:
- Alcoholic Beverages
- Dietary Energy
- Water
- State of Mind (used only for Sober Mode check-in moods)
Tap Turn On All at the top, or enable each individually. There is no read access requested. AlcoLog’s own explanation for Health access says so too: “AlcoLog does not read your health data. It only saves the entries you choose to share to Apple Health.” AlcoLog cannot pull anything back; only writes go through.
After granting permission, the toggle stays on. From now on, every session writes its drinks to Health when it ends, whether you tap End Session or it stops on its own. A drink you add afterwards to a finished session, from History, is written too.
One switch covers both modes: turning Apple Health on here also turns on Sober Mode’s check-in moods if you allowed State of Mind, so switching modes later never finds Health half off. If AlcoLog isn’t allowed to write, the section says “AlcoLog does not have permission to write to Apple Health” until you allow it in the Health app.
# Step 3. Read the disclosure
With the toggle on, a What we write to Apple Health row appears in the section. Tap it to expand the list. It explains exactly what flows across:
- Alcoholic Beverages: each drink is recorded by its alcohol, in your country’s standard drinks (in the UK, the same UK units AlcoLog shows), so a pint and a shot don’t count the same. Only drinks of 0.5% ABV or more are counted; alcohol-free drinks and water are left out. It appears under Nutrition in the Health app.
- Calories from Drinks: the calorie count of each drink is added to your dietary energy intake (Apple’s Dietary Energy), including the calories in alcohol-free drinks.
- Water: the volume of anything you log with the water button, including soft drinks, is added to your water intake.
- State of Mind: in Sober Mode, the mood from each evening check-in. It appears under Mental Wellbeing in the Health app.
- What we don’t write: AlcoLog writes only the data above and does not read any data from Apple Health. No heart rate, steps, sleep, or other health data is accessed.
Nothing flows back from Health into the app; the sync is purely outbound.
# Step 4. How your check-in moods are written
If you use Sober Mode, each evening check-in becomes one State of Mind entry of the kind Apple calls a Daily Mood. Your five check-in faces sit on Apple’s pleasantness scale: Awful at the Very Unpleasant end, Okay at Neutral, Great at the Very Pleasant end, with Low and Good in between. AlcoLog writes only the mood, with no extra labels or associations.
A check-in for today is dated when you make it; a check-in for an earlier day is dated 9:00 PM on that day. Editing a check-in replaces its entry instead of adding a second one.
You can turn moods on or off on their own in Settings > App Mode, with the Moods to Apple Health switch (it shows while Sober Mode is on). Turning it on there also syncs any drinks you log, as in Tracking Mode. Moods are written only while Sync with Health app is on as well, so turning that switch off in Settings stops moods too.
# Step 5. Verify it’s working
Open Apple’s Health app on your iPhone. Tap Browse at the bottom, then tap Nutrition. Scroll to Alcoholic Beverages, Dietary Energy or Water. Check-in moods from Sober Mode are under Mental Wellbeing, in State of Mind.
After you finish your next session in AlcoLog, refresh either of those screens. Each drink in your session shows up as a separate entry, time-stamped to when you logged it. The amount is that drink’s alcohol in standard drinks, so it can be a decimal (in the UK, a pint of 5% beer counts as 2.8). The source for each entry reads AlcoLog.
If nothing appears: check that the toggle in AlcoLog is still on, and that AlcoLog still has write access for each category in the Health app’s sharing settings. Permissions occasionally drop after iOS updates and need re-granting.
# Step 6. The boundary
Apple Health sync is one-way and that’s deliberate. AlcoLog has no need for your heart rate, sleep stages, or workout data; including it wouldn’t change what AlcoScore measures, and it’d give us a much larger privacy surface than we want.
When you delete a drink or a session in AlcoLog, its entries are removed from Health too, and editing a drink in a finished session rewrites its Health entries. Entries written by older versions of AlcoLog stay in Health until you delete them there. It does not work the other way: deleting an entry inside the Health app (tap it, swipe left, delete) leaves the drink in your AlcoLog session history. To remove a drink from both, delete it in AlcoLog (see editing or deleting).
That’s the whole sync. One toggle, write-only access, four categories: Alcoholic Beverages, Dietary Energy, Water and State of Mind.
# What’s next
For other privacy-relevant settings (export, anonymous data, delete-all), see managing data and privacy. To customize what AlcoLog itself looks like, see display and haptics.