LiftProof v1.0 is Live — What We Built and Why

[FOUNDER HARD-WRITE — paragraph 1 of 3 personal story (~80 words). First-person founder voice: "I lift." Open with how long you have been lifting, the kind of training you do (powerlifting, hypertrophy, general strength), and the specific moment that made you start looking at apps. Concrete, not promotional. The reader should finish this paragraph believing you are a real lifter, not someone who built a lifting app to chase a TAM.]

[FOUNDER HARD-WRITE — paragraph 2 of 3 personal story (~90 words). The apps you tried and the specific gaps you hit. Mention Strong, Hevy, Boostcamp by name (you used them, so name them). What did each one do well? What did you keep wishing for that none of them shipped? The honest answer is not "they were all bad" — they are good apps with different design philosophies. The honest answer is "I wanted a thing that did not exist yet." Name that thing.]

[FOUNDER HARD-WRITE — paragraph 3 of 3 personal story (~80 words). The decision to build it yourself. Why solo. Why iOS first. Why 18 months. Stoa LLC as the legal entity. Tie this paragraph to the Iron & Gold thesis that opens the next section, so paragraph 4 reads as the natural answer to paragraph 3.]

The Iron & Gold thesis. LiftProof is built on a simple claim: a strength training app should help you actually get stronger, not help you look like you got stronger on a feed. Iron is the work — the program, the sets, the bar in your hands. Gold is the proof — the chart that shows your one-rep max moving over time, the PR that earns a celebration, the streak that tells you the work compounded. Everything in the app is designed to make Iron visible and Gold honest. We removed every surface that did not serve that claim. No social feed. No badges that mean nothing. No streaks that count days you opened the app instead of days you trained.

What it does. LiftProof ships with a library of named strength programs — 5/3/1 in multiple template variations, GZCLP, Greyskull LP, Madcow 5×5, Linear Progression, Daily Undulating Periodization, and others. You pick a program and the app tells you what to do in each session. Working weights move automatically based on your performance. RPE is built in, not bolted on. The set-execution interface — we call it Monument — is full-screen, sweaty-hand-tested, with a 114-point weight display that you can read from arm's length without taking off your glasses. The full-workout view, Ledger, is the running record of the session.

Apple Watch is first-class. The Watch app is not a remote control for the phone — it is a standalone surface that handles set logging, rest timing, and PR notifications on your wrist. Five complications, four widgets, and a Live Activity keep the active set in sight without forcing you to wake the phone between every rep. If you train without a phone in the rack — most serious lifters do — Watch covers the whole session.

Progress is the third primary surface. Strength charts plot estimated one-rep max over time per movement. Volume charts track total work per muscle group across the mesocycle. PR badges fire when you cross a real threshold — not when you open the app, not when you log a set, but when your data actually shows you got stronger. HealthKit reads workout data so you do not have to log twice if you already track elsewhere. HealthKit is read-only — we never write to your Apple Health record without your explicit action, and we never store HealthKit data outside the device.

What is free, what is paid. The free tier covers the core program library, the set-execution interface, the Ledger view, and basic progress charts. You can run a full strength program and log a full mesocycle without paying us anything. The paid tier ($9.99 per month or $79.99 per year) unlocks the full program catalog, deeper progress analytics, advanced PR tracking, and the Apple Watch features. We are deliberate about what sits on which side of the line: the things you need to train are free, the things that make the app better over months and years are paid. We are also deliberate about what is not in the paid tier — there is no ad-supported tier, no data-broker monetization, no upsell screens that block your set. The paywall exists at one place in the app and you can ignore it forever if you only ever use the free tier.

What is missing. v1.0 is intentionally narrow. There is no AI form-check. There is no social feed. There is no cloud sync — your data lives on your device and nowhere else, and the v1.0 version does not have a built-in way to move it between iPhone and iPad. There is no Android version on launch day (one is in development as a separate codebase). There is no plate calculator. There is no nutrition logging beyond what HealthKit reads from your other apps. Some of these are deliberate refusals we will keep refusing — read /blog/whats-missing-from-liftproof-v1/ for the full list and the reasoning. Some are v1.1 work and will land in the next few months. None of them are accidents.

Privacy is the spine. LiftProof v1.0 has no user account, no analytics SDK, no third-party trackers, no remote data collection. Your training data lives in Core Data on your device. We do not see it, we do not store it, we do not sell it, and we cannot subpoena what we do not have. HealthKit reads are explicit and revocable. The full engineering rationale lives at /blog/why-on-device-only/.

Closing. v1.0 is the foundation, not the ceiling. The v1.1 roadmap includes cloud sync as an optional feature (Sign in with Apple, encrypted, single-account multi-device), Spanish localization, a plate calculator, and refinements to the program library based on what we hear from the first cohort of users. The v1.2 and v1.3 work scopes are sketched out at /blog/whats-missing-from-liftproof-v1/. The changelog lives at /changelog/ and updates with every release. If you find a bug, write to feedback@liftproof.app — every email comes to a human and gets a reply. If you want to talk about the app, jonathan@liftproof.app is the founder address. If you are a journalist, press@liftproof.app reaches Stoa LLC press relations. The App Store listing is live now. The privacy stance is documented at /blog/why-on-device-only/. Thank you for reading.