You miss 11 AM
The hour ends and you are short. The dot goes gray. On any other tracker, that is the end of it.
You walked 120 steps. The goal was 250.
The Stand ring, replaced
Standing up isn’t moving.
Your Stand ring closes if you wave your arm at your desk. This one asks for 250 steps an hour, tells you exactly how many you have left, and turns green only when you have actually walked them.
- No account, no server
- Your data never leaves your devices
- Free tier, forever
On your watch, at ten to
Only 110 steps to go, and you have 10 minutes. You can do this.
On your wrist, and on your phone
Two screens on your wrist. Three on your phone.
No feed, no social tab, no coaching upsell. The watch tracks. The phone remembers.
The honest comparison
What the Stand ring actually asks of you.
One minute on your feet. Not one step. Here is the same hour, measured two ways.
| Apple Watch Stand ring | Hourly Step Tracker | |
|---|---|---|
| What it counts | Standing and moving for one minute | Steps, at a goal you set |
| How short you are | Never tells you | The exact number, all hour |
| When it nudges you | At ten to, to stand | At ten to, and only if you’re short |
| A missed hour | Gone | Win it back in the next hour, at 3× |
| Watch on the charger | Gone | Covered, with no fake steps |
This is not my characterisation of the Stand ring. It is Apple’s. The Apple Watch User Guide states: “The blue Stand ring shows how many times in the day you’ve stood and moved for at least 1 minute per hour.” — Apple Watch User Guide, checked 12 August 2026.
Stood and moved. Not walked, and never a number. That is the whole difference, and it is why an hour can close while you sit at your desk.
Recovery Hour
Miss an hour? Win it back.
A missed hour is gone forever on every other tracker. Not here. It opens by itself, and you get one a day.
Noon becomes a Recovery Hour
Automatically. You never ask for it and there is nothing to tap — the next hour is simply worth triple.
Noon now needs 750 steps, not 250.
Clear it, and both go green
The hour you missed turns green along with the one you just walked. Your day is whole and your streak survives.
You walked 812. 11 AM and noon both go green.
One a day, so a green dot keeps meaning something. It only opens if the next hour is inside your active window — miss your last hour and there is nothing to recover into. And if you fall short of 750 but still pass your normal goal, you keep the hour you are in anyway. You are never punished twice for trying.
Grace Hours
For the hours the watch wasn’t on your wrist.
Earned, not handed out, and never bought. Using one turns a gray dot green and adds no steps you didn’t take.
The watch was charging
Or you were in a long meeting, or ill, or simply forgot to put it on. No steps were recorded, through no fault of yours.
2 PM: no data. The dot goes gray.
Use a Grace Hour
Tap the gray hour on your watch — on the wrist that missed it, in the moment you notice.
Your balance drops 1 → 0.
The dot turns green
And not one fake step is written to your Health data. A Grace Hour protects the streak; it does not lie about what you did.
Steps added to Health: zero.
You earn them. Seven Perfect Days earns one. A Perfect Day is one where every hour went green on its own: no hour missed, so no Recovery Hour opened, and no Grace Hour spent. Free holds one at a time; Pro holds up to ten. A Grace Hour applies to the day you are in, so a day that has already ended cannot be repaired — which is what keeps a streak worth having.
Pricing
Nothing you need to keep a dot green costs money.
Everything you need to keep a dot green is free, permanently. Pro will deepen the buffer and open the full record, when it exists.
Free
$0
Forever. Not a trial.
- Two-question setup
- Hourly tracking and all four complication families
- The weekly green-day view and seven-day history
- One Recovery Hour every day
- Earn and store your first Grace Hour
- The end-of-hour nudge
Pro
Later
Not in the first release.
- Everything in Free
- Store up to 10 Grace Hours instead of one
- Unlimited history, not just the last seven days
- Longest streak, Perfect Days and Recovery success rate
Pro isn't built yet, so there is nothing to buy and no way to pay for it. The first release is the free column, whole. Nothing in Pro helps you keep a dot green that Free cannot.
Why this exists
I built this for my wife.
My wife Camille switched from a Fitbit to an Apple Watch and lost the one feature she actually used. I built this for her, and I'm building it in the open. The longer story is here.
Leave your email and I'll tell you the day it's on the App Store. One message. I don't have anything else to send you.
Questions
The things people actually ask.
Is this a watch app or an iPhone app?
Both. The watch does the tracking, because that is where your steps are. The iPhone is where you look back at the week.
What happens if I miss an hour?
The next hour becomes worth 750 steps instead of 250. Clear it and both hours turn green. Once a day, and it opens by itself.
Where does my step data go?
Nowhere. No account, no server, and no network call anywhere in the app. Your steps are read on your watch and mirrored to your own iPhone. Health access is read-only.
What does it cost?
Nothing. The first release is free, with no in-app purchases and nothing to buy. A paid tier is planned later for a deeper Grace Hour bank, unlimited history and the full statistics — everything you need to keep a dot green stays free permanently.
What do I need to run it?
An Apple Watch on watchOS 10 or later, paired to an iPhone on iOS 17 or later.
Longer answers — what Fitbit’s hourly goal actually did, why the Stand ring is not the same thing, and how the recovery rule works — are on Fitbit’s hourly step goal on Apple Watch.
Help
Support
Email me at rustin@hourlysteptracker.com. I read and answer these myself, so you are not writing into a ticket queue. Telling me your watchOS version and what you expected to happen makes it much faster.
Common fixes
- No steps are showing at all. The app needs permission to read your step data. On your watch, open Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Health, and confirm Hourly Step Tracker is allowed to read Steps. You can also check this in the Watch app on your iPhone.
- The complication is not updating. watchOS limits how often any complication may refresh, so a mid-hour number can run a few minutes behind. Tap the complication to open the app and see a live count.
- The end-of-hour nudge is not arriving. Confirm notifications are allowed for the app, and add the complication to your watch face. watchOS gives apps on the active face a better background refresh budget, which makes the timing more reliable.
- An hour looks wrong after travel. Hours follow your local clock. When your time zone changes, hours already finished keep their original result and new hours use the new zone.
- A dot went gray, or a streak looks off. History is rebuilt from your step data on every background refresh, so give it an hour and it will usually correct itself. If it doesn't, email me the date and I'll dig into it.