StepNow vs Footfall

StepNow is a free, private step counter for iPhone and Apple Watch, designed to make every number easier to trust. VISIBLE FRESHNESS StepNow tells you whether your count is Live, Catching up, Current, Paused, Unavailable, or needs attention. The latest trusted measurement remains visible while the app explains its source and update age. FOCUSED WALKS Start a walking session from iPhone or Apple Watch. Follow session steps, active time, distance, pace, cadence, and Watch heart rate. Pause, resume, or end the same walk across both devices. TODAY AND HISTORY See daily goal progress, steps remaining, distance, energy, hourly movement, weekly momentum, streaks, records, and completed walks. WIDGETS AND LIVE ACTIVITIES Keep the latest trusted count close on supported Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets. Follow an active walk through Live Activities and Dynamic Island on supported devices. YOUR GOAL, YOUR REMINDERS Choose a daily target and optionally enable milestone, afternoon, or evening reminders. PRIVATE BY DESIGN StepNow has no account, advertising, subscription, or external analytics SDK. Movement and walk history remain on your devices and in Apple-provided health and workout storage. StepNow requires iOS 17 or later. Apple Watch features require a compatible Watch running watchOS 10 or later.

Footfall shows the steps your iPhone already counted, and almost nothing else. It has no step counting algorithm of its own, and that is the point. It reads the daily totals from Health, the one place on iOS where an iPhone and an Apple Watch are added up without the same walk being counted twice. The number here is the number there. No second opinion, no arguing with your watch about this morning. The rest of the app puts that number in front of you. A widget on the Home Screen. A circle or a rectangle on the Lock Screen. A medium widget for the week. They refresh through the day, and say so rather than pass off yesterday's total as today's. ON YOUR WRIST Ten years after the first Apple Watch, no built-in complication shows a step count as a number. Footfall does, in four shapes, on any face with room for one. The watch reads Health on the watch, so the count is right even when the iPhone stayed at home, and there is nothing to fall out of sync. The complications are free, like every other widget here. ONE SCREEN, TOP TO BOTTOM A ring that warms from clay to amber and turns gold at your goal, with the count rolling in the middle. The shape of the day: twenty four hourly bars that show when you walked, not only how much. The week in seven bars you can tap, and tapping one moves the top of the screen to that day. The month as dots, each one sized by its steps, and a swipe back through the months before it. Then four numbers: your seven day average, your thirty day average, your best day, and the days you met your goal. NOTHING YOU DID NOT ASK FOR No account. No ads. No analytics. No notifications, no badges, no levels. The streak stays off until you turn it on, because a streak nobody asked for turns into a debt. The app opens no network connection at all, so nothing can leave the phone. Nothing is written back into Health either. FOOTFALL PLUS Counting, the widgets, the watch complications, the goal, kilometers or miles, the day, the week and the month are free and stay free. Footfall Plus is one payment, once, and it adds every past month one by one, the full year day by day, your rhythm by day of the week, records and totals from the first day Health holds, and a CSV export. No subscription. Nothing renews. WHAT IT NEEDS Permission to read steps and walking distance from Health, and nothing else. iOS has been recording those since you got the phone, so your history is usually there the first time you open the app. If you have never walked with the iPhone on you, Footfall will show you an honest empty day. Available in 45 languages. iPhone, iOS 18 and later. Apple Watch, watchOS 11 and later.