Getting started
Installing Steady, walking through onboarding, and understanding what each permission is actually used for.
Installing
Steady is currently in TestFlight beta. You’ll get an email invite or a public link; either way:
- Install TestFlight from the App Store (free, made by Apple).
- Open the invite link on your iPhone and tap Accept, then Install.
- Steady appears on your home screen like any other app.
You need iOS 18 or later on an iPhone. TestFlight builds expire after 90 days, so you’ll get a new one periodically.
Onboarding
The first launch walks through a short setup. Nothing here is permanent — every value can be changed later in Settings, and changing a goal never breaks your logged history.
1 · About you. Age, height, current weight, and biological sex. These feed the Mifflin-St Jeor equation that estimates your starting metabolic rate. Choosing Prefer not to say uses the midpoint between the male and female formulas.
2 · Activity level. Roughly how much you move outside of workouts. This multiplies your BMR into a starting daily burn estimate. Don’t agonize over it — the app corrects this number itself once you’ve logged for a couple of weeks.
3 · Your goal. Target weight and how fast you want to get there, in pounds per week. Steady shows the resulting daily calorie budget immediately, so you can see the trade-off between pace and how much you get to eat before committing.
4 · Training days. Which days you plan to work out. This seeds your weekly schedule — you can build real workouts later in the Workouts tab.
5 · Hydration. Your daily water goal and the size of the bottle or glass you usually drink from, so logging water is one tap rather than typing an amount.
6 · AI key (optional). Steady’s AI food logging works out of the box. If you’d rather use your own free Google Gemini key, you can add it here or later. See AI features.
7 · Photo privacy. Whether progress photos require Face ID to view. Recommended on — see Photos & your data.
Permissions
Steady asks for these as you first use the feature that needs them, not all at once on launch. Every one is optional; declining disables that feature and nothing else.
| Permission | What it’s for |
|---|---|
| Apple Health | Reads steps, sleep, and weigh-ins from your devices; writes back the weight, water, nutrition, and workouts you log |
| Camera | Progress photos, photographing food for AI estimates, and barcode scanning |
| Microphone & Speech | Dictating a meal description instead of typing it |
| Face ID | Unlocking your private progress photos |
| Photos (add only) | Saving a progress photo to your library when you explicitly export one |
| Calendar (write only) | Adding your planned workouts as repeating calendar events |
| Notifications | Reminders you schedule yourself — weigh-in, hydration, workouts, supplements |
Steady never asks for permission to read your photo library, and it can’t see photos you haven’t handed it.
Your first few days
The app is most useful once it has data to reason about, so the first week looks a little different from the rest:
- Weigh in daily if you can. Daily weight is noisy — water, salt, and timing move it pounds at a time — so Steady charts a smoothed trend line rather than reacting to any single morning. It needs a handful of readings before that trend means anything.
- Log food even when it’s ugly. A rough estimate beats a blank day. The adaptive budget needs about two weeks of logs before it starts correcting your burn rate, and it only counts days you actually logged.
- Don’t chase the daily number. One day over budget changes almost nothing. The weekly average is what moves the scale.
After roughly two weeks of consistent logging, Steady switches from estimating your metabolism to measuring it. That’s when the budget starts getting personal — see Your calorie budget.
Next: Your calorie budget →
Steady is a personal project by Hunter Baisden ·
hunter.baisden@gmail.com
Everything you log stays on your iPhone. Read the
privacy policy.