What is Courier?
Courier is an iOS app that treats your health data like the raw copy of a small newspaper: it reads your workouts and sleep from Apple Health, typesets them into a daily issue you can browse, and delivers them to servers that you configure — your note-taking pipeline, your home server, a webhook, anything that accepts an HTTP request.
Why it exists
Fitness platforms increasingly lock your own data behind paid APIs. Courier takes the opposite position: the data is already on your iPhone, so read it there, and let you decide where it goes and what it looks like. There is no Courier server, no account and no subscription — the app is a courier, not a landlord.
The newspaper metaphor
The whole app speaks newspaper. Once you know the vocabulary, every screen makes sense:
| Term in the app | What it actually is |
|---|---|
| Today's Issue | Yesterday's workouts + last night's sleep, assembled each morning |
| Feature article | The detail page of one workout or one night of sleep |
| Issue № | Days since the first day Courier ever saw data ("the inaugural issue") |
| Subscriber | One endpoint you configured: URL + method + headers + secret |
| Dispatch | Sending a record to a subscriber (automatic or manual) |
| Needs attention | A dispatch that failed or is incomplete and wants a human |
| Archive | The bound volumes — a calendar of all back issues |
| Desk | Settings: subscribers, dispatch history, backups, transcription, … |
| Awaiting print | Empty state: no data yet, or Health access not granted |
The five sections
- Today — today's issue: sleep with stages and vitals, workouts with route maps, heart rate, pace and elevation. The masthead shows date, issue number and current weather.
- Think — your annotations timeline: thoughts you typed or dictated, attached to your days.
- Dispatch — the ledger: what was sent where, when, with which HTTP status; plus the queue of items that need attention.
- Archive — the bound volumes: a calendar of every back issue, with trends, and re-dispatch for any day.
- Desk — configuration: subscribers, batch dispatch, dispatch history, notes archive, transcription service, config backup, data source, notifications, language and appearance.
What you need
- An iPhone with iOS 17 or later.
- Health data — an Apple Watch is the typical source for sleep and workouts, but anything that writes to Apple Health works.
- At least one endpoint of your own to receive dispatches. A webhook.site URL is enough to try it out; a companion server like VaultEcho can turn dispatches into Obsidian notes.
Courier never writes
Courier requests read-only access to Health data. It cannot modify or delete anything in Apple Health.
Next: Getting Started.