Skip to content

iOS vs Android

The iOS and Android ports of PulseLoop are built hand in hand and share the same reverse-engineered BLE protocol work. They are not identical, though. Each platform lands some features first. This page is a living comparison of the real differences in design and capability, not language or framework details.

This is a snapshot

Things change fast. When a feature lands on both ports, it leaves this page. Last updated: 2026-07-01. For the canonical state, check each repo: iOS · Android.

AI Coach (iOS only)

This is the biggest difference between the two ports today. iOS has an AI Coach that reads your metrics and answers questions about them. Android has no coach.

On iOS you can choose how the coach runs:

  • Bring your own key for OpenAI, Google Gemini, or OpenRouter. OpenRouter opens up hundreds of models behind one key, with extra options like privacy routing and provider selection.
  • Apple on-device Foundation Models. Runs the model locally on supported devices with no API key and no data leaving the phone. Availability is gated to hardware that supports it.
  • Offline scripted fallback when no provider is configured.

Beyond provider choice, the iOS coach is:

  • Multimodal. You can send images into the chat, for example a photo of a meal or a supplement label, and ask about them.
  • Agentic. It runs a tool loop that can pull your own metrics and search the web, rather than answering from a single static prompt.
  • Proactive. It generates daily check-in notifications from your recent data.

Vitals, Activity, and Sleep dashboards

Both ports now have rich dashboards after the recent iOS UI overhaul. The gap here is small and goes in both directions.

iOS recently rebuilt its dashboards and today page. It now has dedicated widgets for activity goals, heart rate, sleep, blood pressure, and blood sugar, plus zone-colored charts and threshold reference bars on the vitals panels. Blood pressure, blood sugar, and fatigue panels are capability-gated so they only show on rings that support them.

Android still leads on a few detail-level touches: deeper tap-through detail screens per metric with period selectors and stat tiles, and a one-tap combined measurement button. These are polish gaps rather than capability gaps.

Both ports record workouts with GPS and heart rate zones. iOS records a broad set of activity types (walk, run, cycle, gym, squash, sport, yoga, hike, dance, and other), and the AI Coach can log or edit those sessions for you by voice or text, which Android has no equivalent for.

Ring support and protocol

The low-level work has converged. Both ports decode the full jring / 56ff metric set (blood pressure, blood sugar, stress, fatigue, HRV), do blood pressure and blood sugar calibration, support the Colmi QRing, and share the same connection reliability work (write-ACK timeouts, watchdogs, reconnect, proper unbind on forget).

Platform-native capabilities

A few differences come straight from the platform each port runs on:

  • On-device AI is iOS-only, since it uses Apple's Foundation Models.
  • Live status while measuring uses the Dynamic Island and a Live Activity on iOS, and a foreground-service notification on Android.