# BetterRunning > BetterRunning (iPhone/iPad app by Jan Willem van Zweeden.) - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/betterrunning/id6762114312 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`) - Developer: [Jan Willem van Zweeden](https://appshunter.io/developer/1891839511) - Category: Health & Fitness, Sports - Price: Free - Age rating: 4+ - Requires: iOS 17.6 · 12 MB - Languages: American English, Dutch - Released: 2026-06-18 - Data updated: 2026-09-10 - User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/betterrunning/id6762114312/reviews.md ## What is BetterRunning? BetterRunning is an AI running coach for iPhone and Apple Watch. It doesn't hand you a generic 12-week plan — it builds one around your body, and adjusts it every morning based on how you actually slept, how your heart is recovering, and how the weather looks for today's session. HOW IT WORKS When you set a goal — a 5K, 10K, half marathon, or just getting fitter — BetterRunning reads your recent runs, last night's sleep, your heart-rate variability and resting heart rate, and your weekly volume from Apple Health. Your AI coach turns that into a multi-week plan. A new plan, sized for you. Every morning, before you lace up, BetterRunning reads back from Apple Health. - HRV (heart rate variability) — your nervous system's readiness signal - Sleep — duration and stages from your watch - Resting HR and recent training load - Today's weather, the moment you open the app Those inputs become a readiness score, a short explanation in plain language, and — if needed — an adjusted version of today's session. If your HRV is suppressed and you slept poorly, tomorrow's tempo run becomes today's easy 25 minutes. If you're firing on all cylinders, the coach tells you to go. WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT Most running apps adapt after your run. BetterRunning adapts BEFORE it. The difference between reacting to your body and actually listening to it. After each run, the app celebrates your good ones from your real performance — not vague benchmarks. The AI gives specific feedback referencing your actual numbers: pace, heart rate, the elevation you ran through, the conditions you ran in. Watch complications show your readiness score and next session at a glance. NEW IN 1.2 - Plan revision in plain language. Tell your coach "I'm travelling next week" or "make it easier this block" — get back a clean, confirmed change to your remaining sessions. - Tempo blocks inside long runs. Opt-in for advanced runners (half-marathon + goals, or a serious volume base). The coach can layer a tempo, pickup, or fast-finish segment inside your long run when the timing makes sense. - Cycle-aware coaching. Opt-in for female runners. The coach quietly tunes tone, intensity, and recovery emphasis to where you are in your cycle. Phase is inferred on-device — no dates leave your phone. - External-app runs show up. Whether you ran with Strava, Garmin Connect, Workout, or BetterRunning itself — every running workout in Apple Health appears in your plan view, counted as part of your total effort. - Share your readiness card — a square card themed to your readiness tier, ready for the socials. ON THE WATCH Start a tracked run from your wrist. Live pace, heart rate, distance. Interval mode shows the rep you're in and the recovery left. Long-run mode shows the tempo block coming up. Strong split haptics at every kilometre. Workouts, GPS routes, and energy save into Apple Health as first-party data. Plus race time projections (Riegel-based) for every distance, refreshed daily as your fitness changes. PRIVACY AND TRUST No account, no email collection, no third-party analytics. Your training plan and history sync via your own iCloud Private Database — only you can read it. Coaching prompts go to a single endpoint we operate; no other servers, no trackers, no ads All HealthKit data stays in HealthKit. GPS routes never leave Apple's ecosystem. We send the coach summaries and aggregates — never raw timelines, never your location, never your menstrual flow data even when cycle-aware coaching is on. Free 30-day trial. After that, two subscription options. Cancel any time. Requires iPhone running iOS 17.6+ · Apple Watch (Series 5 or later) running watchOS 10.6+ recommended for live workout tracking. Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ ## Version history (last 5 releases) ### 1.5.0 — 2026-09-09 A much faster coach, plans that hold together, and a second goal that sorts out the first. • A faster coach. Every kind of coaching — your daily check-in, feedback after a run, your weekly review, and building or changing a plan — now arrives two to four times quicker. Creating a plan has gone from about 35 seconds to under 20. • A second goal now sorts out the first. Adding a goal that overlapped one you already had used to leave you a "Regenerate all plans" button to press. The plans that genuinely share calendar time with your new goal are now rebuilt for you before the screen closes, and the app tells you how many were reshaped — a changed week should never be a surprise. Two goals also no longer double your running: the week is built once, and a run that suits both goals counts for both. Three overlapping goals is the limit. • Every run gets feedback now. Finishing a run that wasn't on your plan used to produce silence — no coaching and no notification. It now gets the same review a planned run gets, and both kinds now see everything: your recent runs, the weather, and your watch's measurements. • Plans that hold together. Your race lands on the day you chose and is the distance you entered. A week's total matches the runs inside it. No week appears twice, no day gets two sessions, and no run arrives without a description. Each of these was a real fault, found by checking generated plans properly for the first time. • Long runs sized for your week. The long run was capped by a rule meant for high-mileage training, which quietly shortened it on ordinary plans. It now scales with the size of your training week, so a 10K plan can build the long run it actually needs. • Coaching in your language, every time. Choose the app's language in the Profile tab — that choice now outranks everything else. Coaching already written in a language you've moved away from is rewritten as you come across it. Dutch numbers read 5,2 km. Thirty-five phrases that had never been translated now are, including every rest-day morning notification. • Waiting for the coach now looks like waiting. Plan creation shows a bar that only moves forwards, paced against how long your own phone's recent plans actually took, instead of five messages on a loop. • Rebuilding keeps the week you've already run. Regenerating a plan on a Sunday used to be able to take that week's completed runs with it. It doesn't. • Change a plan properly. Swap, drop and edit sessions — not only postpone them — see the change history before a session is done rather than only after, and keep finished plans out of the way in their own Archived section. • On the watch: mark a run as a treadmill run, get a nudge when your heart rate drifts out of the target zone, and scroll the Start-run page to reach everything on it. • Also: per-kilometre splits and segments in km or miles, export your next session as a Garmin FIT workout, one clear marker for today in the week list, and fewer failed answers — coaching that arrives cut short is now noticed and asked for again instead of being shown to you half-written. ### 1.4.0 — 2026-07-11 Run segments, a smarter coach, and a cleaner plan editor. • Track segments on your run. Tap the new Segment button on your Apple Watch — or use Double Tap (Series 9 / Ultra 2 and later) — to mark a stretch mid-run, just like the Action button. Each run then shows a Segments table with distance, time, pace and average heart rate, right next to your splits. Runs you record with Apple's own Workout app show their segments here too. (Beta — we're still polishing it.) • Ask your coach to extend your plan. Running out of runway before your goal? Tell the coach "add a week so I can target a sub-50 10K" and it appends the weeks and moves your goal date — without rebuilding your plan or touching your completed runs and history. • The coach can move today's run to a better day. Beyond softening or resting a session, the coach can now postpone today's run to a smarter day this week — and it never drops it right next to another hard run. • A heads-up when your load spikes. Your daily readiness now flags when your training load is climbing fast, so you can ease into the session before it bites. • One place to adjust your plan. "Adjust plan" and "Edit plan" are now a single screen — rename the plan, ask the coach to reshape it, or extend the timeline, all in one place. • Tidy up your history. Delete a run straight from its detail screen, and accidental 0:00 "phantom" runs no longer clutter your plan or all-time history. • Reliability fixes. Editing a plan's end date no longer wipes its history, a run lifted out of a plan keeps its type (tempo / interval / long), race day always shows the race — even across time zones — and tapping a heart-rate-zone update notification now takes you straight to your zones. ### 1.3.0 — 2026-07-07 New • iPhone widgets (Home, Lock & StandBy) — a full set: Today's Session, Readiness, Last Run, This Week's plan, Streak, Goal Countdown, Race Prognosis, Vitals, and a Readiness Trend. Tapping Last Run jumps straight into that run's detail. • Heart-rate chart on every run — completed runs now show your bpm over the run, laid over your personal HR zones, with min/avg/max, an average line, touch-to-scrub, and a time-in-zone bar. Works for indoor runs too. • Training-load (ACWR) chart on Progress — your acute:chronic workload ratio over time against colour-coded risk bands, so you can see when you're ramping too hard. Improved • More accurate elevation — now measured from the Apple Watch's barometric altimeter (Apple's own method), with a smarter fallback for GPS-only runs. • HRV matches Apple Health — averages your overnight readings so the number lines up with the Health app. • Steadier daily coaching — the Today tab no longer regenerates your coaching every time you open it. • Small polish: cleaner watch "today's run" row; running starts on the Watch (removed the iPhone "Start" shortcuts). Fixed • Goals tab no longer drifts — content could be dragged around the screen on iOS 26; now locked to normal vertical scrolling. • Watch crash on run start (motion permission) — fixed. • Widgets now show real data, and Last Run reflects your actual most recent run — including free runs and rest-day runs. • Share-run card's route line no longer overlaps your stats on photo backgrounds. ### 1.2.5 — 2026-07-01 Fixed a bug in the plan creation mechanism. ### 1.2.4 — 2026-06-29 A smarter coach, a better feel The biggest update since launch. Smarter training under the hood, and a lot more delight on the screen. A smarter coach, and a better feel. • Smarter training under the hood. New threshold-anchored heart-rate zones, an honest training-load signal (ACWR), and pace calibration that no longer drifts on a hot day or a cold one. The plan now eases up when you flag a niggle and pushes when you're genuinely fresh. • Finish your run with a moment, not a shrug. A clear verdict on the run, the route as the visual anchor, milestone celebrations for first runs and PBs, and a one-tap "Coach updated" pill that shows you exactly what changed and why. • A Progress tab that tells you the story. Plain-language insights under every chart, a single range toggle (7d / 30d / 90d / 1y) that re-windows everything, and a readiness summary band right at the top. • Consistency, not quotas. A "weeks you trained" streak — rest the coach prescribes never counts against you. Comeback and hot-streak greetings to match. • Sharper readiness. A bigger gauge, a tap-to-explain breakdown of HRV / sleep / load, and a redesigned day-one calibrating state. • Cleaner everywhere. Tokenised colours, an SF Rounded metric font for the numbers, polished HR-zones / history / Goals / cloud-restore screens, watch complications with deep links, and ~120 new Dutch translations. • Plus the usual reliability pass — accessibility contrast cleared to WCAG AA, fewer silent failures, and a stop to a coach typing indicator that wouldn't stop. ## Apps similar to BetterRunning | App | Rating | Price | Category | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | [Daily Mood Tracker - Moodly](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/daily-mood-tracker-moodly/id6752308593) | 1.0 (1) | Free | Health & Fitness | | [Runbo: Workout Guidance](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/runbo-workout-guidance/id6756812213) | 5.0 (4) | Free | Health & Fitness | | [Runplanner: Route Planner](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/runplanner-route-planner/id6792010218) | — | Free | Health & Fitness | | [The Gym Hub](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/the-gym-hub/id1356502003) | — | Free | Health & Fitness | | [Purple Gym](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/purple-gym/id6736941773) | — | Free | Health & Fitness | | [Vesterbronx Gym](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/vesterbronx-gym/id6664068088) | — | Free | Health & Fitness | --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-09-10.*