Exist

Our 2025 redesign

Welcome to Exist's 2025 redesign! This major update to the Android, iOS, and web apps was the result of more than a year of work to make Exist feel more modern and bring important quality-of-life changes.

When we started Exist back in 2014 (oof, more than ten years ago!), we focussed on Exist as a web app, which is where our strengths lay and what made sense at the time. Over time we built up our Android and iOS apps to do more and more, but they've been feeling a bit dated for some time now. We knew that our next big push would be to bring the apps, and the design, into the modern era. These days people overwhelmingly interact with Exist via their phones, and people expect native apps to provide their main experience. The web has gone from being the predominant way to provide a service, to being a nice-to-have (which I find a bit sad). So we wanted to meet people where they are and provide the sort of experience people expect. This sort of big rewrite was also a chance to think about how we present information, and how to make Exist more useful to you.

Both our Android and iOS apps have been rewritten from scratch using modern technology stacks. We've focussed on making the apps look and feel nicer to use, as well as being more informative. The Android app has a Material Design coat of paint, and gains a dark mode! The iOS app gets a dark mode icon too, and support for Dynamic Type. We've also totally revamped how we deliver and display content in the app so that things like insights in the Home tab can be richer and more informative, with extra graphs, better formatting for things like tags, and graphical content like album art. 

Manually entering data in the Review tab on both Android and iOS should now feel faster and smoother. Speaking of manual attributes, you can now group these, and your tags, with custom subgroups! We saw how people wanted more control over how their tags were ordered and displayed, so we hope this helps you keep everything a bit neater. On top of this we've added new groups called "Symptoms" and "Medication" to aid the ways that people use Exist to track these things. You can take advantage of these new management options in the web app too, which has gained a new coat of paint to match.

To add further to customisation, you can now pin four attributes to the top of your Home tab, for quick access to the things you care about most. And when you tap through to look at any of your attributes in the apps, you can see the full history of your raw data by month. It's easier and faster to get straight to the data you're looking for.

In terms of syncing data, the Android app gains support for syncing nutrition data from Health Connect, giving you more ways to get food and drink data into Exist. The iOS app also adds support for alcoholic drink data from Apple Health.

On top of all these visual and functional changes, and just as importantly, we've created a solid, modern foundation for being able to extend the apps with more content, and more ways of interacting with and managing your data in the years to come.

Oh and by the way, did you notice our new logo? It's not just any old triangle, but the greek letter delta, which is commonly used in maths to represent the amount of change. Because Exist is all about tracking the changes.

We hope you love Exist's new update! Enjoy.