Cadence vs Apple Health Medications

Apple added Medications to the Health app in iOS 16. Is the built-in feature enough, or does a dedicated app like Cadence offer something meaningfully better?

Quick comparison

What Apple Health Medications does well

It is already on your phone

There is nothing to download or set up. If you have an iPhone running iOS 16 or later, the Medications feature is already in the Health app. For people who want the simplest possible solution, this is hard to beat.

Drug interaction checking

When you add multiple medications, Apple Health checks for known interactions and warns you about potential conflicts. This is a useful safety feature that Cadence does not currently offer.

Free with no conditions

There is no upgrade tier, no ads and no data collection beyond what Apple uses for Health. It is genuinely free in every sense.

Critical Alerts

Since iOS 17, Apple Health Medications can send Critical Alerts that break through Focus modes and Do Not Disturb. These are system-level notifications that are hard for third-party apps to replicate.

Where Cadence goes further

Adherence tracking and streaks

Apple Health logs whether you took or skipped a dose, but it does not calculate an adherence percentage or track your streak. There is no way to see your consistency over a week, a month or a year. Cadence shows your adherence trends over time, which is essential for understanding whether your routine is actually working.

Health metric correlations

This is where the gap is widest. Apple Health stores your medication data and your health data in the same app -- but never connects the two. Your blood pressure readings and your medication adherence live side by side without ever intersecting.

Cadence Pro pulls in 10 health metrics from Apple Health (heart rate, resting heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, steps, weight, blood glucose, sleep and HRV) and displays them alongside your adherence data. Over time, you can see correlations between your consistency and changes in your health. This turns abstract advice like "take your medication consistently" into something you can observe in your own data.

Prescription label scanning

Point your camera at a prescription bottle and Cadence reads the label, matches it to a database of 2,300+ medications and fills in the name and dosage automatically. Apple Health Medications requires you to type everything manually.

Supply tracking with refill alerts

Cadence tracks how many doses you have left and sends a reminder when your supply is running low. Running out of medication because you forgot to refill is a common and avoidable problem. Apple Health does not track supply.

Insights dashboard

The Insights tab in Cadence Pro surfaces patterns between your medication habits and how you feel. It generates a daily briefing based on your correlations and streak data, highlights what is working and what needs attention and provides deep-dive views across adherence, health, journal and medication data.

Journal check-ins

Cadence includes a daily journal where you can log mood, energy and symptoms alongside your doses. Over time, this creates a record that helps you and your doctor understand how your medications are affecting your day-to-day wellbeing.

Journey visualisation

The Journey feature turns your medication streak into a visual mountain trail. Each day you stay consistent, the landscape shifts with new seasons, milestones and heights over a full year. It is a motivational layer that rewards consistency without being intrusive.

Dedicated Apple Watch app

Cadence includes a purpose-built Apple Watch app for logging doses, viewing your schedule and receiving reminders on your wrist. Apple Health offers basic medication logging on Apple Watch through the Health app, but the experience is not as focused.

Apple Health is a good start. Cadence takes it further.

If you take one or two simple medications and just need a basic reminder, Apple Health Medications is a perfectly reasonable choice. It is free, built-in and handles the fundamentals.

But if you want to understand whether your medication routine is actually making a difference -- if you want to see your adherence percentage, track your supply, log how you feel and see correlations with your health data -- that is where Cadence picks up.

The two are not mutually exclusive. Cadence reads data from Apple Health, so you can use both. Apple Health provides the health data layer; Cadence provides the medication management, insights and tracking layer on top of it.