The newest Gyroscope V9.5 is now available for download in the App Store.

This update is focused on your daily loop: what happens when you open the app in the morning? How can we automate the boring stuff, and keep your focus on the important insights? How can you hit your targets and have more perfect days?

The biggest additions are a new Morning Review with daily points and scoring, a faster morning routine, improvements to food camera and uploads, upgraded meditations, more detailed grade reports, and many bug fixes and improvements.

The secret to daily habits

Did you brush your teeth today? Probably. It seems like an obvious thing that everyone does.

But until very recently, it was not a normal daily habit.

The first American toothbrush patent was issued in 1857, but it took a lot longer until they became mainstream and people actually started doing it in the morning. The tool existed, and people generally knew clean teeth were a good idea. But until about 1915, almost no one was actually brushing their teeth daily.

Then Pepsodent launched a revolutionary new type of toothpaste in 1915. It had a secret ingredient: Mint. The mint wasn’t needed to clean your teeth, but they found that without it people didn’t really know if it was working.

The secret was not really having cleaner teeth. It was the instant reward, and feeling like you were doing something. The mint, the foam, the immediate feeling that something had happened. That small payoff helped turn an optional health behavior into a default behavior. Later on, similar insights were found with soap and shampoo needing to produce a lot of foam, even though the foam was also not necessary. Humans (and most creatures) are wired to respond to realtime feedback.

The secret ingredient: tokens

We had the same problem with health. People would know that tracking their data or hitting their targets was good for them, but without enough excitement and instant feedback, it was still hard to do.

Data collection can happen mostly automatically, but awareness and follow-through still requires daily action. Just like with brushing teeth—just buying the toothpaste isn’t enough. You also can’t brush your teeth really intensely for two hours on January 1, and then skip it for the rest of the year. It needs a quick session every day. The morning routine and all the coaching habits follow the same pattern.

In this update, your morning flow is optimized to give you immediate and understandable feedback on your lifestyle. The targets and coaching are like brushing your teeth. Good to do. But the bonus tokens you get in the morning... that is the mint. The extra reward that makes it stick. In this case, that extra reward is tokens.

Morning Routine, review, and rewards

The main thing everyone should be doing in Gyroscope is the Morning Routine. Instead of needing to open the app many times a day, or to browse around any different sections and screens, we have streamlined it into just one flow—so you can just keep flipping through the cards and your coach lines everything up for you.

Just like brushing your teeth, this should be done on most days when you can.

You can configure it from your Habits section, and now it is much easier to shape to your liking. Now you can adjust if you prefer it to be faster or more in-depth, adjusting how long the routine can go or how many habits are included. If you want the very minimum, you can set it to simply review yesterday.

That routine can include meditation, mood, journaling or whatever else you want to make part of your morning, but one of the key parts is reviewing yesterday.

That is where you get the actual benefits of all that tracking and effort. And also the feedback needed to keep adjusting it, instead of just doing the same thing over and over again. During the review process, you can also enable some automations, like auto-exporting your food to Apple Health. There are also some intelligent checks, like confirming that your food history is completely logged before continuing (to make sure your report is based on what you actually ate).

Then you’ll get your report from your coach on how you actually did. It focuses on your current coaching focus, but it also covers the full picture: steps, sleep, meditation, protein, and your other targets, so you can understand your day as a whole instead of just staring at one metric.

And if you hit the right targets, now you also get rewarded! Literally and figuratively.

The ultimate reward of course is that you will just be more healthy and successful in the future. But the short-term reward now comes in the form of tokens, which already have real value inside the app. And at the upcoming Max tier, this stage will eventually be able to unlock actual cash back too. It is a small thing each day, but repeated over time it can really shape behavior.

As the intelligence and power increases in the app, these tokens are becoming more and more valuable—all the AI features use some tokens, so you can use them towards things like meditations, food tracking, workouts, chat, and even more uses in the future.

Improvements to food photos and uploads

We also spent a lot of time fixing food capture and uploads, where people had reported various bugs and edge cases in different views or situations. Now all these should be resolved, making both the food camera and food upload process smoother than ever.

Advanced camera options

Now at the top of the health camera, you can access a few more camera options: you can turn on the light for cases of really low light, flip the camera to front-facing, or switch to macro lens mode.

The macro mode can be useful if you need to get more up close (like to a particular label), though generally we recommend taking the photo from about a foot away to keep perspective of size and scale.

Batch uploading food

We recommend taking photos with the camera in the app right before you eat, and generally this will be the best way to get realtime feedback and avoid gaps in data. However, you also have the option to take the photos on your phone and upload them at the end of the day or the next morning.

Note that for the batch upload, the images are filtered to make it easier to find your likely food photos. This removes things like screenshots, photos you took while walking around, etc. to narrow it down to the likely meals. However, you can turn off this filtering by pressing the "see all" button in the right corner. If you ate while on the go and not at a stationary location (that was tracked with Places), then you may need to switch off this filtering and see the full view.

Sometimes images would not be on the phone (and were just in iCloud, or saved in a different format), but now those issues should be fixed and all images will get converted and shown. After selecting images, the upload process has also been streamlined to handle interruptions and let you retry failed uploads without having to go back.

We also fixed some issues with the fullscreen camera mode—you can access this from the force-press menu or the shortcuts icon. In some cases this would show a horizontal photo, a more zoomed-in photo, or look different from the main camera, but now that should be resolved.

Meditation, now faster and much more customizable

With V9, we have upgraded our meditation experience to use new voices and more tailored meditations. Usage has gone up almost 10x since last year, as many people are doing meditations daily and incorporating it into their routines.

Now meditations display in dark mode at night. You can switch between dark and light instantly with the button at the bottom. Background mode has also been improved, so now you can lock your phone screen once the meditation has started playing and it will be able to continue loading (in previous versions the phone needed to stay unlocked).

We also improved loading speed here, so when you hit start it should now begin within 5-10 seconds while still being deeply personalized.

For instant load, recent meditations are now saved at the top so you can repeat what worked instantly instead of rebuilding a fresh one. This also saves on token usage, as each minute of meditation now uses a few tokens to generate custom audio.

Meditation Customization

The customization options are much deeper too. By default, the meditations know about your history, coaching preferences and latest status.

However, now you have even more options to dial it in. You can share more detail about the kind of experience you want, enter a specific mantra or affirmation that is meaningful to you, customize the voice, and even include religious practices or traditions if you want scriptures or a certain style incorporated into your routine. Or you can leave it mostly on default, do the quiz, and let your coach keep tailoring it based on your latest data and interests.

Grades and reporting

In the Health tab you can easily see an overview of how you are doing, with grades in each category like food and fitness. Now if you are curious about how exactly the grade was generated, you can see the details in the coach section.

In this version, the grades are bigger and easier to understand, with larger fonts and an easier to read display. Now it is easier than ever to see how you are doing, with a clearer overall grade plus more text explanations, and meters that break the result down into the key components behind it.

You can find the grades in the Coach tab inside each section. Instead of just seeing that something is good or bad, you can more quickly understand what is pulling it up, what is dragging it down, and where to focus next.

One more thing: improved workouts

Some users now have access to the new workouts system, with a new selection of programs, equipment options, and customizations. We are still testing it and making improvements here, but it should be much more powerful than the previous version.

In the new workouts section, you can chat with your coach in realtime as you are in the middle of the workout.

There is more coming here soon, but we wanted to start getting it into people’s hands now and getting feedback.

Custom importing of workouts has also been improved. Now you can select if you want to save a copy to Apple Health, and specify the exact duration.

And much more behind the scenes

There are also a lot of smaller fixes, polish updates, and reliability improvements throughout the app in this release. The goal is not just to add new screens, but to make the whole system feel solid enough that you actually want to come back and use it every day.

Our mission is to help more people strength train, meditate daily, and get the world's best coaching for their health. It can be hard to do every day, but as you keep using the app, it should start to feel less like a task and more like your new default.

If Gyroscope has been helpful for you, or if you want to support that mission, please post a review in the App Store or share the app with your friends.