Guide · updated 9 Oct 2026

Apple Health export to Claude: the full-history route

Since 2026 Claude’s iPhone app can peek at your recent health data on request — but that is a window, not an archive. The complete record, every step and night and workout since you first wore the watch, lives in one place: the on-device Health store. Apple offers no cloud API for it, so the only Apple-provided way out is the export file. This guide covers how to make it, what is inside the zip, and how to get a decade of it in front of Claude without uploading your health data anywhere.

Step 1: export from the iPhone

On the iPhone: open Health, tap Summary, then your picture or initials at the top, and choose Export All Health Data. This is Apple’s own documented path — no third-party app in the middle. The phone builds a zip on-device, which can take several minutes on a long history, and hands it to the share sheet. Save it to Files, AirDrop it to your computer, or keep it on the phone. Expect tens to hundreds of MB depending on how many years you have.

Step 2: what is inside the zip

The heart of it is export.xml: the entire HealthKit store as one enormous XML file. Every measurement is a <Record> entry with a type, a value, a unit and start/end dates, plus the device that measured it; workouts come as <Workout> entries with duration, distance and energy burned. A seven-year history is on the order of half a million records. Alongside it sit export_cda.xml (a clinical-document copy of the same data, often even larger than the original) and a workout-routes folder with one GPX file per GPS-tracked workout. The zip is not made for reading — it is made for machinery.

Why not just ask Claude on the iPhone?

The native integration is real and useful for everyday questions — “how did I sleep this week?” — but it is a beta on Pro and Max plans, currently limited to the US, read-only, and it answers over what HealthKit exposes in the moment, not over your complete multi-year history. The open-source Apple Health MCP servers (which feed the XML export to a local database Claude can query) work from the same file you are about to make. There is no shortcut hiding here: HealthKit is an on-device store with no backend API, so every route to the full archive — ours included — starts at the same export button.

Step 3: read it with Claude

Open the Soundings importer and drop the zip on the page: nothing is uploaded — the file is unzipped and parsed entirely in your browser — and you see the whole history as one timeline, with each value labeled by the device that measured it. Download the resulting store (open JSONL plus a manifest) and point the MCP server from the open-source package @alumeet/longitude at it: Claude can then answer questions over every year of it — and if you also import a Garmin or Withings export, over all of your devices at once.

Soundings is built and run by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is also why this guide stays link-honest: every claim above points at Apple’s or Anthropic’s own pages, or at code you can read.