Originally published at: AppBITS: Drink More with HiWater - TidBITS
I am not a naturally thirsty person. Left to my own devices, I probably wouldn’t think to drink beyond meals or after exercising, and since I don’t regularly consume coffee, tea, juice, soda, or beer, I don’t get the liquid many people take in merely by existing. However, as much as this means I don’t have to think about lugging one of those massive water bottles around with me wherever I go, I’ve learned that increasing hydration does have its benefits, such as needing little or no lip balm or hand lotion in the winter and a much reduced chance of muscle cramps while running.
What drove me over the edge, however, was what turned out to be a random fainting spell in August 2022 while doing via ferrata (an easier and safer version of mountain climbing) at Whistler in British Columbia. After I woke up from my 90-second faint, getting to the top of the climbing course in near-freezing temperatures, being ferried down in a maintenance truck on highly interpretive “roads,” and spending two hours in the ER with a pulse of 38 wasn’t enjoyable. (OK, the drive down would have been fun if I’d been feeling better.) Happily, in the inevitable cardiologist appointments and testing afterward, all the doctor could come up with was, “Lots of people faint sometimes.” Nevertheless, he told me to try to increase my low blood pressure by eating more salt (yay!) and drinking more water (boo!), with a recommended amount of 100 ounces per day.
Despite the cardiologist’s recommendations and my best efforts, I have never organically managed to drink 100 ounces of fluid in a day—almost 3 liters. I could probably physically do it on a dare—I have twice managed to down the entire jug of colonoscopy prep drink—but it would be uncomfortable and require even more frequent visits to the restroom. The saving grace is that food usually provides about 20% of the water we need each day, so that brings me down to 80 ounces. I may have hit that once or twice.
Enter HiWater
I decided I’d do better if I had an app I could use to track my fluid intake and that would nag me periodically to make sure I was drinking. I can’t remember how I settled on indie developer Gong Zhang’s HiWater back then, but overall, it has been a help, if sometimes an annoying one, which is sort of the point. It didn’t help that HiWater’s built-in calculator suggested that, as an active 50-something guy, I should be drinking 115 ounces a day. Inconceivable.
At a basic level, using HiWater requires setting a goal and logging every drink you have. The app tallies all those drinks to show a running total, along with a body hydration score. The utility of the hydration score is that it accounts for how much you’ve drunk and how recently, and it declines gradually as your body processes fluids. HiWater prompts you to drink not by time, but when your hydration drops below a certain level. Time-based notifications are also available if you prefer them.
What makes HiWater a relative pleasure to use is its attention to detail. It provides a comprehensive catalog of drinks, categorized by the six levels of the water pyramid, which ranks common beverages by how healthy they are for you. Water is best, of course, followed by coffee and tea. After that, the pyramid suggests limiting your daily fluid intake from low-fat/soy milk, diet drinks, caloric drinks, and sweetened drinks.
It would be tedious to wade through all the options in the catalog whenever you have a drink, so HiWater lets you create shortcuts to log a specific beverage and amount with a single tap. For me, that’s usually a small cup of water or a big glass, though I also always have most of a bottle of homemade kombucha at dinner and occasionally a glass of wine.
In reality, however, I mostly rely on HiWater’s well-designed Apple Watch app, which makes it easy to log drinks from the Quick Menu on my wrist. HiWater also supports logging drinks via Siri Shortcuts, but this approach is slow, requires interaction on the watch, and is unreliable on the HomePod. I blame Siri, not HiWater.
HiWater does a good job of presenting monthly, annual, and total stats when you tap the Stats panel on the Today screen. The History screen provides even more historical data, should you wish to look back farther. I’ve never paid any attention to the stats because I use HiWater only to chivvy me into drinking more regularly.
Even though that’s why I use it, HiWater’s nagging can be bothersome. I periodically become irritated by its notifications, especially when I’m traveling or at an event and can’t easily drink. (Again, I’m not one of those cameloids who is surgically attached to a water bottle.) Being told you should drink when you can’t, or when you’re otherwise engaged, is much like being told by Activity to stand up while you’re in a movie theater.
More than once during a trip or event, I’ve silenced HiWater in Settings > Notifications > HiWater, then forgotten to turn it back on. To be fair, HiWater has extremely flexible notification settings, allowing you to limit notifications to certain days of the week, set the hydration level that triggers them, and restrict the times of day they alert you. I’d appreciate an option that would silence its notifications for a specified number of hours or days. But this is a quibble, and mostly my issue with rebelling against anything that tells me what to do, even when I’ve asked for it.
Overall, HiWater is an elegant, capable app. If you’re interested in tracking your fluid intake, or perhaps want to log what you drink as a way of reducing your intake of unhealthy beverages, give it a try. (Gong Zhang also makes HiCoffee for those who want to manage their caffeine intake.) Most of what you want to accomplish with HiWater can be done for free, but a Pro membership gives you more Apple Watch faces and complications, lets you set custom water pyramid goals, add notification rules, change app icons, access additional widgets, and share with the Health app. It costs $0.99 per month, $5.99 per year, or $9.99 for a permanent license—the one-time purchase option is welcome.
) at meals.