The US spends about $4.9T on healthcare last year, much of it due to administrative waste or preventable chronic illness. While health apps have historically been limited to simple trackers of exercise and nutrition, in 2025, we’re seeing AI-enabled apps that can truly make a dent in the size of this problem.
I’ve been working in healthcare since 2013, when I was recruited by the White House to become part of the HealthCare.gov rescue team. Since then, I’ve scaled a mobile health app to 10 million users, was one of the first people to publish peer-reviewed research on deep learning in medicine, and now run Empirical Health, which builds AI-enabled primary care.
2025 is the most exciting time to be a builder and a user in health I’ve seen.
What follows is my guide to the best health apps of 2025, including both the best of the old guard and emerging AI-native health apps.
Breaking health down into strategy and tactics
Our health needs are complex–any one app won’t satisfy them all. I really like the breakdown that Peter Attia uses in Outlive. In order to live a long and healthy life, we need to avoid the “four horsemen of the apocalypse”: heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and neurodegenerative disease. That’s our strategy.
To do that, we need to measure our biomarkers to understand where we stand, and then optimize behaviors across five areas: nutrition, exercise, sleep, and emotional health. In addition to these four, I’d add fertility. These areas are our tactics.
The next sections will expand on health apps for each tactic. We’ll start with understanding your biomarkers, and then move into nutrition, exercise, sleep, emotional health, and fertility.
Understanding your biomarkers
If you have an Apple Watch, Fitbit, Pixel Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch, Whoop, or Oura, you have dozens of biomarkers being measured every day. Once you add blood tests into the mix, you may have more than one hundred biomarkers to understand.
What do all those mean? How do you tell which values are normal? And more importantly, how do you actually formulate a data-driven action plan?
We designed Empirical Health to be your first stop to understand your biomarkers, formulate an action plan with one of our doctors, and then execute one of the plans (potentially using one of the many great apps below).
Carrot Care is focused on helping you understand your bloodwork, and supports hundreds of lab tests. It’s great for people who have had extensive testing done.
For those who manage chronic conditions, Bearable has one of the best symptom trackers I’ve seen. It’s especially valuable for those with “invisible illnesses” like Long Covid, Dysautonomia, or POTS, where symptoms and triggers may matter more than labs. Guava has a very powerful clinical records integration.
Nutrition 3.0
While traditional nutrition apps like MyFitnessPal are great at tracking, a new generation of nutrition apps are reinventing the category in an AI-native way. Here are two I love.
Cal AI is so simple I wish I had invented it. It lets you track calories just by snapping a photo. Yuka lets you scan food and cosmetics to identify additives, and even better, suggests alternatives.
Exercise
Research shows that exercise has a more powerful effect on your health than even smoking. A great exercise program includes four dimensions: zone 2 training (cardiovascular endurance), high intensity training (improves your VO2Max), strength training, and balance.
Whoop classically focused on daily health scores – recovery, strain, stress, and sleep – more recent updates have added more proactive coaching about how to train. For those with Apple Watches
Athlytic and Bevel provide Whoop-like functionality for Apple Watch.
Runna is a new entrant that uses AI to personalize running plans, helping with zone 2 training.
Gentler Streak is a good character-driven option for those who want a slightly less intense exercise plan.
For strength training, Hevy is great and supports Apple Watch.
Sleep
Oura has always had top-notch sleep tracking, with recent expansions into nutrition (e.g., AI to scan photos) and exercise.
Designed for Apple Watch users, AutoSleep automatically tracks sleep duration, quality, and disturbances without requiring you to manually start a session. I like it because it tracks naps automatically.
Sleep apnea and insomnia are two of the most common sleep conditions, and there are plenty of apps to help. Doctors from Empirical Health diagnose and treat sleep apnea. Stellar sleep offers an online CBT program for insomnia.
Mental Health & Stress Management
Calm and Headpsace are the classics, and still great options. A more recent entrant is Finch, a self-care pet, which offers a nice character-driven approach to self-care.
Fertility & Women’s Health
Glow has multiple products that help with cycle tracking, fertility, and even raising your baby. It’s a very complete suite. Clue is a popular alternative, as-is the built in tracking in the Apple Health app (which stays 100% private on your phone).
What’s next in 2025-2027?
In 2025, it’s clear many of the most popular categories of Health & Fitness are shifting from tracking, to proactive action driven by AI. In the next few years, I think everybody is going to have the equivalent of an AI team of nutritionists, physiologists, medical researchers, and doctors advising them on their best life. I’m personally excited to see how this category changes by the end of 2025, and what new winners emerge.
