Exist Blog

Exist 2023 updates

Although we've been keeping our public roadmap for Exist updated with the latest changes, it's been a while since we've posted news here on the blog. So here's a quick look at updates and changes we made to Exist in 2023.

Sleep breakdown attributes

We added support for syncing new sleep attributes: deep sleep, light sleep, and REM sleep. These will now sync from Fitbit, Oura, Withings, and Garmin, as well as Apple Health via Exist for iOS. Awakenings can now sync from Apple Health as well.

Trakt integration

We added a new Trakt integration, which can sync time watching TV and time watching movies.

Attributes page refresh

The page for managing your attributes was getting a bit unwieldy for users with a lot of attributes, so we gave this page a design update. Groups now have coloured headers to make it easy to scan for the one you want, and they're collapsible, so only the group you're interested in will take up space on the page. And any changes you make to your attributes on this page will now automatically save, without you needing to click a button to submit your changes.

New weekly insights

We added some new weekly insight types for recently-added template attributes such as time watching TV, time watching movies, and gaming time.

Maintenance updates

We also did some less-exciting updates throughout the year to keep up with changes in some of the services we integrate with.

Since free access to the Twitter API was removed, we had to remove our Twitter integration. This sadly continues the trend of social media services closing down API access.

Oura's API v1 is scheduled to shut down in January 2024, so we moved our Oura integration over to v2 to ensure smooth syncing of Oura data going forward.

And since Apple bought Dark Sky and shut it down, we had to find a new source for our weather data. We went with Apple's new weather service, which doesn't include air pressure, so that attribute has been removed. Otherwise the data is fairly similar, so users shouldn't notice the change too much.

Mobile screen time from RescueTime

If you have an Android device and you use RescueTime to track mobile screen time, this will now sync to Exist as well.

New graphs for trends pages

The mood trends page has long had a graph of your strongest mood correlations that we really loved. This year we brought this graph to the trends pages for all your other attributes, too. It makes it easy to see at a glance what other attributes relate to the one you're looking at.

Manual tracking is here!

We've just launched one of our biggest updates ever for Exist! Today we're introducing manual tracking features. Now you can create and track any number you like in Exist, quickly entering the data directly into our Android and iOS apps.

Manual tracking is a huge change in how Exist works, and the culmination of years of work. We hope it'll dramatically expand the ways you can use Exist.

We already support custom tags to let you track anything you can't sync from a device or service automatically, but they're restricted to a yes/no value. So you can use a tag like "coffee" on days you have coffee, and Exist can help you find patterns in how your coffee drinking is related to other things, like productivity, your mood, or your activity levels. But custom tags don't let you track how many coffees you drink.

This is the gap manual tracking fills. For anything you can think of where you want to enter a number, you can use manual tracking. You can create your own attributes with any of these types:

quantity (e.g. 2 coffees)
decimal (e.g. 13.5 kgs)
duration (e.g. 02:15 time in meetings)
percentage (e.g. 65% daily habits completed)
scale from 1-9 (e.g. 4/9 stress level)
time of day (e.g. 2:45 pm last had caffeine)

With this update, you can track whatever numbers you want in Exist, alongside those official attributes we already support, and they'll work just the same. We’ll track their averages, long-term trends, and of course find correlations, just like we do with your existing attributes and tags. Manual tracking makes the power of our data analysis available to any number about your life you want to track, and removes the need for a separate app for tracking your habits and symptoms.

So what should you track?

Medication and energy level tracking are hugely popular requests on our public roadmap, and manual tracking is perfect for these. In fact, you can pick "energy level" from our list of templates and track it with a 1–9 scale, just the same as we use for mood. So we're happy to be able to deliver on these suggestions from the community.

With duration attributes, you can track how much time you spend in meetings, catching up on email, or commuting to and from the office. You could also track time spent on hobbies like practising a musical instrument or learning a language.

Custom tags are still great for attributes that don't need a value, such as tracking when you work from home, days that you take a nap, or the activities or habits you do each day. Custom tags can be great for tracking health factors and medical symptoms, such as when you get a headache or have back pain. But for some symptoms, you might find it useful to track them as a scale attribute, rating them from 1-9 based on their severity. This works well for pain or symptoms that you experience often, but which vary in intensity. A scale is also great for tracking subjective measures, like your energy or stress level.

If you do the same thing most days, but at different times, the time of day attribute can be useful for keeping track. We already track bedtime and wake time if you have your sleep data syncing to Exist, but if you often take naps you might like to track the time of your naps to see if napping later in the day affects your sleep the following night. You could also track the time of your last coffee or your last meal to see how these things affect your sleep quality. Time of day attributes also work great for fasting, if you don't fast at a set time each day but want to keep track of when your fast starts and ends.

Some food tracking is best suited to tags, like tracking whether you ate a whole food group like dairy or gluten, but you might want to use quantity or decimal types for other foods. For example, tracking your water or caffeine intake (we have templates for these attributes), how many times you snack each day, or how many alcoholic drinks you have (this one also has a template).

Some other useful things you might want to track include time spent watching TV, playing video games, listening to podcasts, in video calls, or studying. If you're trying to build habits, like getting up from your desk and stretching every hour, it's easy to add these into Exist along with everything else you track too.

We're excited to see how everyone will use manual tracking, since Exist is a very personal product, and everyone uses it a little bit differently. We hope these new features will make Exist easier to use, and help you get more insight into your behaviour.

How to create a new manual attribute

To create a new manual attribute, go to the Review tab in Exist for iOS or Exist for Android and tap the "Track something new" button at the bottom to open the form. This form will give you a list of templates to choose from, where we've already defined the attribute and you can just select it to add it to your account. If you don't see what you're after in the list, you can create your own custom attribute and define all the details yourself.

Because we've defined these templates, we know more about them than we do about something you create yourself. This means we can offer better analysis for these attributes than for a custom one, where the analysis has to be more generic. For this reason, we recommend selecting a template if there's one that suits your needs, but you can always define something custom when you need to.

If you choose to define your own custom attribute, you'll need to give it a name, choose the value type (from the options listed above), and choose a group for it to belong to, such as Health, Mood, or Activity.

Once you've created your new attribute, you'll see it show up on the Review tab and you'll be able to track its value each day when you track your mood and custom tags. When we have enough data, we'll be able to surface correlations between your manual attributes and the rest of your data, too.

Pricing changes

Exist has been $6 a month for eight whole years, since we launched way back in 2014. We haven't paid attention to inflation, or what competitors charge — we've just worked hard to make something that felt valuable enough to be worthy of that six dollars a month.

It's been a tricky decision, but with manual tracking, we feel like we've dramatically expanded what Exist can do. Exist can now be incredibly useful as a habit-, symptom-, or chronic illness-tracker on its own, even if you never connect another service. And with our full API, developers will be able to treat Exist as an "analysis platform" that can be connected to any data source they have access to. The new pricing reflects how much more valuable we think that is, and of course helps the two of us keep on working to support and expand Exist to do even more.

So from today, new users will pay US $6.99 a month, up from $6, or $62.90 a year, up from $57. For existing users (who've entered their card details already), we wanted to provide some extra time to prepare for the price increase, so you'll be charged the same amount until 1 July, when we'll apply the new pricing to those accounts as well. This means your next charge after 1 July will be at the new price.

What's next?

Our next steps will be to launch our API update for developers, letting them tap into the power of manual tracking, and as you all get stuck into your own tracking, we'll be taking on your feedback to keep making manual tracking better.

Coming soon: manual tracking

We're nearly ready to launch one of our most-requested (and biggest!) changes to Exist: manual tracking. Before we do, here's a little sneak peek at the new features and how they work.

Right now, you can create tags in Exist to track anything you want: symptoms, medications, people you spend time with, habits and hobbies, or even foods you eat. But tags are limited. You can choose whether to use a tag each day or not, but you can't track a quantity with a tag. This is where manual tracking comes in.

With manual tracking, you'll be able to use our mobile apps to track numeric values for anything you like. This will help fill the gaps in what data we're able to sync automatically from other devices and services, by letting you enter it yourself.

When creating a manual attribute, you'll be able to choose from lots of different value types:

Quantity (e.g. 2 coffees)
Decimal (e.g. 32.5° indoor temperature)
Duration (e.g. 2:15 time in meetings)
Percentage (e.g. 65% daily tasks completed)
Scale from 1-9 (e.g. 4/9 stress level)
Time of day (e.g. 2:45 pm last had caffeine)

Manual tracking is in beta testing right now, and we're planning to launch these new features to all users very soon.

Removing the Facebook integration

Unfortunately, changes in Facebook's terms of use mean we can no longer provide our Facebook integration, and we've had to remove it.

This is the second time this process has happened to us — the first was with Instagram, which coincidentally is also a Facebook (well, now "Meta") product. After Facebook bought Instagram, they started taking steps to limit how users could make use of their own data programmatically. Eventually, after making it harder and harder to get access, they removed entirely both the ability to see how many likes and comments your post has received, and their permission for apps to access any Instagram data for personal profiles. And now almost the same thing has happened again with Facebook.

Facebook has dramatically tightened its rules around "valid uses" for programmatic access of user data. There are only a few quite specific reasons we're allowed to access your posts, and "personal analytics" doesn't count, so our access has been removed. This follows earlier changes on their part to make it harder to give apps permission at all — previously users had to reconnect our Facebook integration every three months, the only integration of ours that required this ongoing confirmation.

Personally, I don't like where this seems to be heading. Big companies who have come under fire for neglecting user privacy, such as Facebook and Google, have begun a trend of tightening access to user data for third parties. This feels like no more than "privacy theatre", meant to reassure users that they "take your privacy seriously", as the most egregious abusers of private Facebook data for nefarious purposes has been... Facebook. Tightening their hold on user data doesn't really make you safer when the abuse is coming from inside the house.

Moving mood to a 1-9 scale

One of the changes we promised as part of our manual tracking work for this year was to expand the mood scale from a 1–5 scale to a 1–9 scale. We've had beta testers already trying this out on beta versions of the Android and iOS apps, and everything works fine, so we're now rolling this out to everyone.

Why the change?

A larger mood scale allows more nuance and gives you more fine-grained control over your mood rating. I think the biggest change you'll notice is that instead of having to pick "Okay" if you don't want to commit to a good or bad rating, you now have the option of "Slightly good" and "Slightly bad". We hope this will make it easier for you to pick a rating that feels right, and it also means we can give you a more detailed breakdown of your mood ratings across averages, insights, and trends.

Here's a reminder of how the new scale compares to the old. Essentially each rating in the old scale has a new in-between rating either side, which I've highlighted:

Scale	Terrible	Very bad	Bad	Slightly bad	Okay	Slightly good	Good	Very good	Excellent
1–5	1		2		3		4		5
1–9	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9

We hope you'll enjoy this change, now available in Exist across the mobile and web apps!

Hello Habits: track your habits automatically with Exist!

From Jan. 2022, Hello Habits is no longer available.

Habit tracking and creating your own goals for Exist attributes have been highly-requested features on our public roadmap and in our annual user surveys. It's very rare to find a habit-tracking app that offers an API for us to sync that data to Exist, so we decided to build one ourselves.

We've called our new app Hello Habits and have released it on iOS already, with an Android version on the way.

If you connect your Exist account to Hello Habits, you can use your Exist data to automatically track habits you want to build.

You can use custom tags, or attributes like time asleep, bedtime, active energy burned, workout time, protein, or tasks completed, for example. Just choose an attribute or custom tag, then choose whether you want a daily or weekly habit, and set a goal amount to aim for. Each day when your data syncs to your Exist account from other services like Fitbit, Apple Health, or Todoist, or when you update your custom tags in Exist, Hello Habits will automatically sync that data and show whether you're on track with each of your habits.

If you create habits from your custom tags, you can even add these tags to your day from Hello Habits, so you can update your habits while checking your progress.

You also can turn on a daily reminder to complete your habits, and you can set a badge on the app's icon to show you how many habits are still incomplete for today.

New in Exist for iOS: Shortcuts support

Our latest update to Exist for iOS brings support for the iOS Shortcuts app. You can now use shortcut actions to add tags to your Exist account for the current day.

The Shortcuts app lets you automate all kinds of tasks on your phone, using built-in apps, changing settings on your Apple device, or with third-party apps like Exist for iOS. You can make shortcuts based on your location or the time of day, or add shortcuts to your home screen so you can turn lights on and off or start a favourite playlist with a tap.

With Exist for iOS shortcuts, you can make entire shortcuts to add frequently used tags and save you time. Or you can add a tag to your Exist account as part of a shortcut that does other things as well, like adding the tag "french" whenever you open your flash card app, or adding the tag "swimming" to your Exist account when you arrive at your local pool.

To get started, make sure you have the latest version of Exist for iOS. Then, open up the Shortcuts app and create a new shortcut.

Tap the search bar at the bottom of the screen to show the options you can choose from for your shortcut's first action. Tap on "Apps" to see a list of apps that offer shortcut actions.

Choose Exist from the list of apps.

You'll see a list of shortcut actions available—right now there's just one. Tap it to add it to your shortcut.

There's a placeholder for the tag name in this shortcut action. Tap it to open a list of your Exist tags. You can choose any of your Exist tags.

You can also choose to be presented with the list of tags each time the shortcut runs. Tap "Ask Each Time" for this option.

That's all you need to create a shortcut that adds a tag to your Exist account for the current day.

You can add more actions to add other tags, or take other actions. For example, I have a shortcut to add the tag "gym" and open my workout app when I arrive at my gym.

How to get the most out of Exist

Exist offers a lot of different ways to look at your data, and different kinds of analysis. Depending on your goals, you might want to use Exist in a different way. Let's look at a few common goals you might have, and how to get the most from Exist for each one.

Before we start, though, here are a couple of steps you'll want to start with, no matter what your goals are:

Sign up, then connect as many services as you can/feel comfortable with. The more data Exist has access to, the more opportunities it has for finding interesting correlations and insights in your behaviour (You can use this interactive page to see what services we support and how much data you'll get in your Exist account based on the services you use)
Start rating your mood and adding custom tags every night in our mobile apps or on the web. This is optional, but many of our users find combining this kind of manually-entered data with passively-tracked data like exercise and sleep help to uncover the most interesting and useful insights

If your goal is: To see what Exist can tell you about your behaviour

Even if you're not sure what you want out of Exist, it can be fascinating to uncover insights about your behaviour, correlations between your actions, emotions, and environmental factors, and keep an eye on long-term trends for things like sleep, mood, and weight.

If you're not looking for anything particular, or trying to change your behaviour, but are simply curious about what Exist might tell you based on analysing your data, here's how to get the most from Exist:

Check the Home tab in our mobile apps to see insights every day about your recent behaviour and what this day of the week normally looks like for you

Check the Trends tab in our mobile apps once a week (the trends graphs update on Sundays) to see how your long-term trends are changing for weight, productive time, steps, and sleep
Shuffle the correlations on the Trends tab in our mobile apps to discover correlations we've found in your data
Read the weekly email we send each Monday to see how things went last week and discover a random set of correlations we've found

If your goal is: To track and improve your mental health

Exist includes built-in mood tracking that combines with the rest of your data to help you discover what affects your mood positively and negatively, how your mood has changed long-term, and which days of the week are your happiest days.

If you're particularly interested in tracking your mental health, finding triggers for mood changes, or improving your overall mood, here's how to use Exist to get the most out of it:

Use the Review tab in our mobile apps to track custom tags and mood, and turn on the nightly reminders so you never miss a day (or you can choose to get an email each night instead of using our apps—change this on your attributes page)
Use custom tags to track emotions (e.g. stress, irritable, tired), and anything else you think might affect your mood (e.g. working from home, feeling unwell, pain or medical symptoms, different foods, vitamins, or medications, caffeine or alcohol, people you spend time with, etc.)
Check the Mood trends page and optimise page on the web once a week to see what we've identified that makes the biggest difference to your mood—both good and bad, and to see what other correlations we've found to mood

If your goal is: To lose or gain weight

Exist's long-term trends graphs are perfect for keeping an eye on something that changes slowly, such as weight. We can also help you understand what correlates to increasing or decreasing weight, so you can be more informed when developing a plan of attack for adjusting your weight.

Research shows diet has the biggest impact on weight change, but exercise can help, and is certainly important in terms of overall health. If you're trying to lose or gain weight, here's how to use Exist to help achieve that goal:

Track your food intake with Fitbit or any app that syncs to Apple Health
Track your activity with a fitness tracker, smartwatch, or an app that syncs to Apple Health or Google Fit
Check the Trends tab in our mobile apps weekly to see how your weight is changing long-term
Visit the Optimise page on the web monthly to see which attributes correlate most strongly to changes in your weight
Don't forget to check the Trends pages on the web for Lean Mass and Body Fat Percentage too, since not all weight is equal

If your goal is: To track an illness or medical issue

Our built-in custom tags are perfect for tracking medications and symptoms of illness. Our correlations can help you understand what correlates most closely with your symptoms, and our tag trends pages can give you useful stats such as the frequency of your symptoms, and a calendar view to explore when you've experienced certain symptoms over time.

Whether you're tracking an existing diagnosis, monitoring general health, or trying to uncover triggers of symptoms or pain, here's how Exist be used in a more medical-focused context:

Use custom tags to track medications, symptoms, and appointments with doctors, physiotherapists, etc.
Use custom tags to track anything you suspect could be a trigger or could be making your symptoms worse, such as food groups (e.g. gluten, dairy, soy), alcohol and caffeine consumption, stress and energy levels, personal care routines and habits, etc.
Make sure you've allowed one of our mobile apps to track your location so we can also find correlations between your data and the local weather conditions
Check the Trends pages on the web every couple of weeks for the symptoms you're tracking to see what correlations we've found
The Trends pages on the web will also show how long it's been since you last used a tag, and how often you use it on average, which may be useful information at medical appointments

Exist collects extremely personal data, which means the way you use it will be personal, as well. Hopefully these ideas will help you get started in figuring out what makes Exist most useful for you.

New in Exist for iOS: Correlation picker and sharing

The latest update to Exist for iOS includes three main improvements for correlations:

Correlation picker

You can now choose any two attributes in the correlation picker to see if Exist has found a correlation between them. If no correlation exists (ha), we'll let you know. This feature is already available to Exist for Android users, too.

Or, you can use the shuffle button to choose two random attributes and look for a correlation between them.

When two attributes do correlate, you can tap the strength and confidence sections of the correlation description to see a short explanation of each:

The confidence of a correlation is shown as a rating out of five stars. The more stars, the more sure we are that these two attributes are correlated in some way.

The strength is shown as a percentage (16% in the example above), and tells you how strong the relationship between these attributes is.

Rate correlations

You can finally rate correlations in Exist for iOS now (this feature has been on the web and in our Android app for a while). Tap the "Rate" button and choose from two positive and two negative ratings. If you choose a negative rating, you'll stop seeing this correlation throughout Exist (including on the web), unless you use the correlation picker to show it again in future.

Share correlations

You can now tap the share icon on a correlation to create an image of the correlation and share it to another app or save it to your phone's camera roll.

Next up

In beta right now we're testing a dark theme compatible with iOS 13's dark mode. Look forward to that one in the next update!

Historical browsing in Exist

A few months ago we released an update to the Exist web app that includes some different options for browsing your data from past days, weeks, and months. There are lots of options for exploring your data, so let's look at how it all works.

The dashboard

When you first log in to Exist, you'll land on the dashboard for today.

This view includes today's insights, cards for all of your attributes for today, and a 30-day graph.

Your insights will change each day, and include information about today's data on the left, and information about longer periods, like the past week or month, on the right:

If you want to see this same dashboard for a day in the past, you can use the left arrow just above the data cards to go to yesterday:

You won't see insights, but your data cards and 30-day graph will update to show data for yesterday. You can keep using the arrows to browse through different days, or click the double arrow to return to today. Or, if you have a particular day in mind, you can simply adjust the URL to visit your dashboard for that day. Dashboard URLs are formatted like so:

https://exist.io/dashboard/2019-7-14/

Finally, you can adjust the 30-day graph on your dashboard to hide attributes you don't want to see. Click on the cog icon just above the graph to choose which attributes should show up:

Weekly view

At the top of the dashboard you'll see options for Day, Week, and Month view. The default dashboard is the day view, so click "Week" to visit the weekly view.

Here you'll see bars for some of your attributes, showing how close to your average you got per day and across the whole week. You can hover over each day to see what your total was for the day, and how much of your average the total was.

You'll also see a graph of your tags for the week, showing which days each tag was used:

And if you scroll down you'll see your mood ratings and notes for each day of the week. Finally, there's a graph at the bottom of this page of all your attributes. This one shows your average daily value for each attribute per week, so you can get a longer-term view of how your data has changed over time. While we often use rolling averages throughout Exist to smooth out big, short-term changes in your data, these averages only use your data for each particular week:

As with day view, you can use the arrows to jump between weeks, or you can adjust the URL to jump to a particular date. Week view has URLs that are formatted like this:

https://exist.io/dashboard/2019-w28/

And you can always click the double arrow to jump back to the current week:

Month view

Finally, click on "Month" and let's look at what you can do on the month view.

This page has bars for some of your attributes, just like the week view, except these show your total for the month compared to your average.

The month view also has a calendar, where you can see the data for these attributes per day. Each day will also show a coloured circle matching your mood rating if you've rated that day. Click the arrow next to any attribute to load that attribute's data into the calendar:

You can also use this calendar to jump from to a particular week or day by clicking on the week numbers or the individual days.

There's also a card for tags, showing how many times you used each tag for the month. Tags also have arrows, so you can click on any of these to show them on the calendar and see which days you used the tag.

And of course we finish this page off with another graph. This one shows your average daily value for each month, so you can easily see a year or more of your data at once. It's great for seeing the bigger picture and catching any changing trends in your data long-term:

The month view has the same arrow controls for browsing previous months, and you can adjust the URL to jump to a particular month if you prefer. The URLs are formatted like this:

https://exist.io/dashboard/2019-6/

In another post we'll look at our new trends pages and other ways to explore the meaning behind all this data. But if you just want to browse your data to see what the numbers are, these historical browsing options should provide the views you need.