Updates

Search your symptom vault, and log without duplicating

Search and A-Z sorting in the symptom vault

If your symptom vault is already a long list, you can now search it by name directly — the same alphabetical (A-Z) sort button that Medication Cabinet already had is available there too.

One day, one entry

If you log a symptom and it comes back later the same day — a bit better but still there, worse, or fully resolved — the app now lets you update today's entry instead of creating a new one. You'll see an icon next to the symptom in "Today's log" to do that check-in anytime. This only applies within the same day — each new day still gets its own entry, so symptoms that naturally recur often, like fatigue or nausea, don't get merged across different episodes.

As always, if something doesn't work the way you expected or you have an idea, let me know.

Group related symptoms under one episode

Temporary episodes

A cold, tonsillitis, gastritis — something acute, not a permanent condition, but that sometimes brings several related symptoms along with it. Until now there was no way to group them: they stayed as separate entries with no connection to each other. Now you can create a "temporary episode" (for example, "Tonsillitis, week of the 20th") and link any symptom you log while it lasts, either when you log it or afterward. When you build your report or export a PDF for your doctor, those symptoms show up grouped under the episode that caused them, instead of mixed in with everything else.

You can create, edit, and mark an episode as resolved from Settings → Profile, or directly from a symptom entry itself.

As always, if something doesn't work the way you expected or you have an idea, let me know.

Blood pressure logging, and a bunch of small fixes that added up

Blood pressure, now in the app

Added blood pressure logging: systolic, diastolic, optional heart rate, and whether you took it sitting, lying down, or standing. For now it's just a log — the app doesn't tell you yet whether a reading is high or low, since that requires comparing it against a multi-step test I decided to hold off on a bit longer, to build it with the safety it deserves (the same reason active presyncope measurement isn't ready yet either — see the July 17 entry). Like the rest of the optional tracking, it's off by default.

A less cramped bottom nav bar

Made the bottom navigation bar a bit taller with larger icons — several people mentioned the tabs felt cramped.

Onboarding that scrolls instead of clipping

The welcome screens now scroll instead of getting cut off on smaller phones or with larger text sizes.

Edit your custom exercises and therapies

In Movement, you can now delete or rename exercises and therapy types you added yourself. The app's built-in catalog stays uneditable, on purpose.

Bedtime and wake time in Sleep

You can log the exact time you went to bed and woke up, and the app calculates the duration for you. I also split duration into separate hours and minutes fields instead of a single decimal number.

Custom beverages in Hydration

If you drink something that isn't on the list — tea, for example — you can now add it as your own option.

An "Average" option in HRV

When logging heart rate variability (HRV), you can now mark the context as "Average," alongside morning, afternoon, evening, or post-exercise.

Quick links in About

Added a direct link to the beta follow-up questionnaire and to the project's Bluesky account under Settings → About.

As always, if something doesn't work the way you expected or you have an idea, let me know.

More ways to describe how you feel, and a weight log built with care

Describe a near-fainting episode

If you've ever felt like you were about to pass out — vision going dark or tunnel-like, ringing in your ears, cold sweat — you can now describe the episode in more detail: what triggered it (standing up, standing for a while, physical exertion), what you felt right before, what happened (you managed to sit down in time, almost fell, or briefly lost consciousness) and how the recovery went. For now, this log is only what you feel and notice — I decided not to include blood pressure or pulse measurement yet; that's waiting for a mobile version so it can be done with the safety it deserves. If you mark that you briefly lost consciousness, the app suggests seeking medical care soon, especially to rule out anything heart-related.

A space to describe pelvic pain, with care

I added a detail layer for pelvic pain, written with particular care around language: the external-location option says "on the outside, in the intimate area" instead of a cold clinical term, and you can mark whether the pain relates to sexual activity — it's entirely optional and doesn't trigger any follow-up questions if you'd rather not go into detail. It also recognizes patterns worth mentioning to your doctor soon, like a very sudden and intense onset, unusual bleeding, or fever the same day.

A detail layer for chest pain, the symptom that needed the most care

I also added a detail layer for chest pain — probably the most sensitive symptom the app logs so far, since it can range from something common and benign (like costochondritis) to signs worth checking with a doctor soon. You can describe where it's located, what it feels like, what triggers it, and what comes with it, including palpitations or shortness of breath. If you mark that the pain feels like tearing, the message the app shows changes based on the conditions in your profile: if you have vascular Ehlers-Danlos (vEDS, one of the subtypes with the highest cardiovascular risk), the information includes recommendations specific to that subtype, like avoiding chest compressions. Either way, the app never diagnoses — it only suggests what's worth bringing up with your care team soon.

A weight log built with care, not a fitness app

I added an optional weight and height log, but deliberately different from what you'd expect from a typical health app: it never calculates or shows BMI anywhere, has no trend charts or goals, and every entry asks for a reason (GI flare, medication change, fluid retention, appetite change, or other) instead of saving a bare number with no context. I designed it this way after researching the connection between EDS and disordered eating, and how weight-tracking apps can make it worse. It lives in your Profile, not in Movement, and it's off by default — you turn it on only if it's useful to you.

As always, if something doesn't work the way you expected or you have an idea, let me know.

A simpler way to describe muscle or joint pain

Tell me in your own words

Until now, logging pain in a body zone meant picking a specific clinical term — "subluxation," "tendinitis," "enthesitis." Now you can start from whichever end feels more natural: tap a body zone and the app asks what kind of pain it is; or type it directly into the symptom vault ("leg pain," "muscle pain") and the app picks up on what you already told it, asking only for whichever piece is missing. From there, if you don't know (or don't need to know) the exact clinical name, four simple questions fill in the rest: which side it's on, what it feels like, what came before it, and whether it gets worse with movement. If you do know the clinical term, the "I already know what this is" button still takes you straight to the usual list.

A different icon for each kind of pain

In your day's log, normal muscle soreness after exercise no longer shows the same warning icon as a subluxation or dislocation. Each category already had its own icon when logging — it just wasn't reflected in the day's summary yet.

Save what you already know about a zone

If a zone hurts because of something you already know well — say, a surgically repaired knee — you can save that history once, either from Settings → Profile or right after logging it. Next time that zone hurts, you'll skip straight to "how intense is it?" and "different from usual?", instead of describing everything from scratch again.

Bruises and bleeding, in more detail

If you log a bruise, a cut, or bleeding, the app now asks how intense it was and whether it showed up on its own (no impact) or after a bump or scrape — before, that kind of event just saved directly, with no follow-up question. That gives you a fuller record if you ever need to show your doctor how your bruising or bleeding has looked over time.

Two smaller but useful details

The medication picker that appears after logging a symptom now only shows your "rescue" medications — scheduled ones no longer show up there, since picking those right after an acute symptom doesn't make much sense. And in the medication cabinet, alphabetical (A-Z) sorting no longer resets every time you switch tabs.

As always, if something doesn't work the way you expected or you have an idea, let me know.

Real charts in your report, and a fairer look at short ranges

Real charts in your report

Added actual charts: severity of your most frequent symptoms over time, how often each symptom shows up, and your mood day by day. I chose to distinguish lines by stroke style (solid, dashed) instead of adding new colors, to keep the same simple look the rest of the app already has.

A day or a week now looks different from a month

With 1 or 7 days selected, the report barely showed anything — which makes sense, since a trend chart with that little data doesn't say much. Now, for a short range, instead of near-empty charts you get a detailed day-by-day log: symptoms, doses, fever, mood, everything you logged those days. For a month or more, you still get the usual summary with charts.

A couple fewer bugs along the way

Found (and fixed) a bug that left the report completely empty, plus a couple more tied to the new charting library. Nothing major, but worth being upfront about — the beta is still a beta.

As always, if something doesn't work the way you expected or you have an idea, let me know.

A more flexible medication cabinet, a report with more context, and rare-disease condition info built for this community

This time I worked on a few things: helping you find your medications faster, letting you log more realistic supplement doses, giving your report more to say, and a source of condition information I wrote for this community instead of inheriting from a generic health site.

Find what you're looking for, faster

If your medication cabinet is already a long list, you can now search it by name, active ingredient, or notes right in the Botiquín tab. I also added an optional A-Z sort toggle — by default I keep the order you added things in, so nothing changes unless you turn it on.

More realistic supplement doses

Probiotics are measured in billions of CFU, not milligrams, so I added "billions" as a unit — or you can type in whatever other unit you need. You can also log supplements with multiple active ingredients, like a B-complex with a different dose for each vitamin (B1, B6, B12...), instead of forcing everything into a single number.

Condition information that isn't generic

Until now, opening a condition's info sheet from your profile always pulled from MedlinePlus — a great resource for common diagnoses, but not built for conditions like Ehlers-Danlos subtypes, POTS, dysautonomia, or mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS).

So I wrote my own content, for 56 conditions common in this community, prioritizing rare-disease-specific sources (like Orphanet) instead of general databases. It's still content I'm actively reviewing, so if anything doesn't match what your care team tells you, always trust your care team. I kept MedlinePlus as a fallback for conditions that don't have their own content yet.

Your report, now with mood and patterns

I also improved the Report tab. Before, if you looked at more than one day at a time, your mood entries disappeared from the summary — now they stay, with the breakdown of your mood states and the words you used most in that period.

Patterns you used to only see in the PDF

The PDF already detected things like a symptom clustering mostly in the afternoons. Now I also check whether two symptoms relate to each other — for example, whether on the days you logged one, the other clustered at a particular time of day — and that shows up both in the in-app report and the PDF, not just one of the two.

I reorganized the report so it's not a wall of text

If opening your Report ever felt overwhelming — everything mixed together, no clear place to start — you were right. I redesigned it: there's now a short summary at the top, and each section (symptoms, medications, mood, patterns, etc.) can expand or collapse on its own, with long lists showing what matters most first and a "show more" for the rest. Patterns and an active fever stay open by default since they matter most; everything else starts collapsed. And in Settings you can permanently hide the mood, mental state, or structural sections if you don't need them.

Laying groundwork: medication type

On top of that, you can now mark each medication as "scheduled", "rescue", or "both" when you create or edit it. It's a small change on the surface, but it's the foundation for the app eventually understanding the difference between what you take every day and what you take in response to a symptom.

A small thing: the broken symbol in the PDF

If you exported a PDF and saw a black box where a warning symbol should've been, I already fixed it — it was a PDF font issue with a couple of special characters.

As always, this is what's shipping in the closed Spanish beta — a preview, not something you can use yet while you're on the English waitlist. Still, if you're curious what's being built, this is the place to check back.

A PDF report for your doctor, and a fuller profile

A clinical report to bring to your appointment

You can now export a PDF summary of your symptoms, medications, and recent patterns, ready to bring to a medical appointment. I also built a separate, compact emergency card with your diagnoses and allergies, for situations where someone else needs that information fast.

A fuller profile

I added date of birth and known allergies/triggers as profile fields — both shown on the clinical report, so you don't have to recite them from memory at every appointment.

Settings, reorganized

I reorganized Settings: it went from one long menu to separate screens by topic (profile, optional tracking, language, account data) — easier to navigate, especially if you just want to change one specific thing.

From what you did, to whether it worked

With the foundations already built in June, this was the stretch where ZebraUp started doing the thing I haven't seen any other symptom-tracking app do natively: not just asking what happened, but helping you see whether what you did about it worked.

Specific questions for fatigue and abdominal pain

Fatigue and abdominal pain got the same treatment headaches already had since June: instead of asking for a single severity number, the app asks more specific questions tailored to each symptom type — much closer to how you'd actually describe an episode.

Did what you did actually work?

After logging a symptom, the app asks what you did about it — rest, a medication, changing position — and later asks whether it helped. Over time this builds a real record of what's actually helped you, instead of having to remember it from memory at your next appointment.

MCAS and allergy detail

If you suspect or have a diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), you can turn on more detailed logging of reactions, suspected triggers, and warning signs. It's fully optional, and I left it off by default.

Crisis mode

On a bad day, the app quietly simplifies itself: optional reminders and suggestions hide automatically, leaving only what's essential. You don't have to configure it — the app detects it.

As always, if something doesn't work the way you expected, or you have an idea, let me know.

The foundations: from a simple app to a real tracking system

June was the month of rebuilding the foundations: how you log a symptom's severity, how you manage your medication cabinet, and what information you have on hand about your own conditions — before getting, in July, to the part that makes ZebraUp different from other symptom apps.

A more honest base for severity and medications

I redesigned how you log a symptom and a medication from the ground up: a clearer severity scale, half-pill dose increments for titration, and the ability to log several medications at once when you take them together (say, a combo you always take in the morning).

Condition information, without leaving the app

I added a first version of condition information right inside your profile — before, you had to look it up elsewhere. (I later replaced this first version with content I wrote myself for rare conditions — see the July 14 entry.)

A tab for movement and recovery

I added a new tab: Movement and Recovery. Physical activity and therapies logged as what they are — a pair, not something separate — designed to recognize pacing instead of rewarding "doing more," without reinforcing the fear of movement that's common with these conditions.

Your data is yours

I added the ability to export all your data, import it back, or delete everything completely if you ever want to leave — without having to ask me. It's a core principle of ZebraUp: your data never leaves your device unless you decide to share it, and you can always take it with you.

Specific questions for headaches

For headaches, instead of asking for a single severity number, the app started asking more specific questions — much closer to how you'd actually describe an episode. (Fatigue and abdominal pain got the same treatment a little later — see the next entry.)

More things you can optionally track

I added optional logging for bowel movements, sleep, hydration, and heart rate variability (HRV), each one toggled on separately from Settings. Actually detecting patterns across these logs — like whether poor sleep tends to mean more pain the next day — is something I'm still working on; for now, each log lives on its own.

A summary, not a pile of data

So all this logging doesn't become one more chore, I added a weekly narrative in the Today tab, a symptom-frequency dashboard, and a view of how well each medication in your cabinet has actually been working for you.

I started this project on May 27, 2026 — back then it was called ZebraTracker, before it became what's now ZebraUp. By early July I had a solid foundation — what came next, the part that makes daily logging actually worth it, is in the next entry.