Anvil Workout runs entirely on your device. No account to create, no server dependencies, no internet connection required. Your programs, workout history, and personal records stay on your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch companion—making spotty gym basement Wi-Fi irrelevant.
A lot of fitness apps call themselves "offline-capable" but still need an internet connection to sign in, validate subscriptions, or back up data. Anvil Workout takes a stricter stance:
The squat rack is usually in the back corner of the basement of the building, and that's exactly where cell service dies. An app that needs to phone home between sets is an app that freezes mid-workout. Anvil Workout doesn't care — your workout runs the same whether you're in airplane mode or on 5G.
Hotel gyms, garage gyms, outdoor calisthenics, a cabin in the woods with no Wi-Fi. If you can open the app, you can train. Apple Health lives on the iPhone too, so a finished workout is saved there straight away, with nothing waiting to sync later.
Your workout history is personal data. It reveals your schedule, your physical capacity, and patterns that can be combined with other leaks to identify you. We chose not to collect it, because the safest data is the data that never leaves your device. The one thing the app sends is a crash report when something goes wrong, which you can switch off and which contains no workout data. The privacy policy lists exactly what it holds.
When a cloud fitness app shuts down or pivots, and many do, your data usually goes with it. On Anvil Workout, your data lives in your iPhone's local storage. If you use iCloud Backup or back up to a computer, it is included in that backup, so it is as durable as anything else on your phone.
Anvil Workout is a native SwiftUI + SwiftData app. SwiftData is Apple's on-device persistence framework — think of it as a private, local database optimized for Apple hardware. Your programs, session history, and exercise library all live in SwiftData on your device.
There is no backend service because there's nothing for a backend to do. Your iPhone is the server, the client, and the database — all at once.
Most popular fitness apps sit somewhere on the spectrum below. We're on the left end by design.
Offline isn't strictly better — it's a tradeoff. If you want a social feed, a leaderboard, or one-tap sync between your iPhone and iPad, a cloud-based app is the right choice. If you want a focused lifting app that never asks you to sign in, never disappears, and never sells your data, Anvil Workout is built for you.
Offline doesn't mean minimalist. Anvil Workout ships with:
One-time purchase. Works fully offline. No subscription, no account, no ads. Logs sets on Apple Watch and iPad.
Download Anvil Workout