slotho 26.2 — the fast, read from what you actually ate
slotho 26.2 went out on 29 August. The centre of it is fasting: a proper schedule editor, and six stage markers that run off the times you already logged rather than a stopwatch you have to remember to press. Around that sit a today ring widget, hydration that responds to how much you actually moved, and rebuilt monthly summaries.
There is also one thing that is not in this release, and it is near the bottom of this post rather than left out of it.
Your eating window, on a dial
You set an eating window on a 24-hour dial, per day of the week — a different window on Sundays if that is how your week actually goes, or one window applied to all seven. The fast begins when the window closes.
The part worth explaining is what happens next. Most fasting apps are a timer: you press start, you press stop, and if you forget either one the number is fiction. slotho reads the fast from your food log instead. A logged meal is the truth; the schedule is only the plan. If you eat an hour late, the fast reflects the hour you ate, not the hour you intended to.
We have written that up properly on the fasting page, including the thresholds that stop a black coffee from counting as breaking a fast.
Six stages, and how precise they aren’t
As a fast runs, slotho marks six commonly cited milestones — digestion at 0 hours, falling blood sugar around 4, glycogen around 8, fat burning around 12, ketosis around 16, autophagy around 24. Each row shows the clock time it will fall at for your window, and the stage you are currently in is highlighted.
Those hours are approximations, and we would rather say so on the way in than in a footnote. They are the boundaries usually cited, they move considerably from person to person depending on your last meal and what you have done since, and slotho is not measuring your ketones — no app working from a phone and a watch can. It is counting hours and telling you what is generally associated with that point.
One small decision we are pleased with: a 16:8 window can never reach the 24-hour marker, so slotho greys those rows back rather than dangling them in front of you. A progress bar towards something your own schedule rules out is just a number going up.
A today ring, on the Home Screen
New in 26.2: a today ring widget showing water and energy against their daily goals, plus the current fasting phase. It comes in a Home Screen size and two Lock Screen sizes.
It is drawn entirely from a snapshot the app publishes, which means the widget itself never touches Apple Health — a detail nobody asked for, but it is the reason it refreshes at each stage boundary instead of guessing.
Hydration that accounts for the day you had
Water targets are now energy-based rather than a flat daily number: a day with a long workout in it asks for more than a day at a desk, because it should. Alongside that are electrolyte cue cards, which appear when the pattern of what you have logged suggests they are worth a thought — sodium, potassium and magnesium being the ones people notice the absence of when fasting or training hard.
These are cues, not instructions. slotho supports general wellness; it does not do medical advice, and a cue card is a prompt to think, not a prescription.
Monthly summaries, rebuilt
The monthly view has been reworked so a month reads as a shape rather than a wall of totals. The food database also got a pass this release: enriched metadata, search that works properly in languages other than English, and corrected nutrient values across a good number of entries — the least glamorous item on this list and probably the one you will feel most often.
Sharing
Meal plans can now be sent through the standard iOS Share Sheet, and there is an iMessage sticker pack for the times a sticker says it better than a screenshot.
What is not in this release
The Apple Watch app does not show your fasting schedule. That sync does not exist yet, so the eating-window display on the watch stays empty. It is being worked on and it is not in 26.2 — if you install this expecting the schedule on your wrist, you will be disappointed, and we would rather you knew that here than found out on the App Store.
Everything else on the watch is unaffected: workouts, quick logging and the goal sync all work as before.
Where the data goes
Unchanged, and worth restating because a release post is exactly where this quietly drifts. What you log lives on your device and in your own Apple Health. It moves between your iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch through your own iCloud, under your Apple Account — Apple’s infrastructure, not ours. There is no slotho account and no slotho server holding any of it.
The requests that do leave your device are food lookups — the words you typed or the barcode you scanned, going to the public Open Food Facts and USDA FoodData Central databases, with nothing about you attached. Searching for a picture to put on a favourite food sends that food’s name to an image search engine, and nothing else. And if you choose to contribute a food you created, that goes to Open Food Facts and is public and permanent there. The full detail is in the privacy policy.
More
- Intermittent fasting in slotho — how the window and the stages actually work
- slotho FAQ — including what syncs to the watch and what does not
- slotho support — if something here does not match what you are seeing
- slotho on red8.io — food, water, caffeine, sleep, workouts and fasting, in Apple Health
Fasting is not right for everyone. If you are pregnant or breastfeeding, have a history of disordered eating, or manage diabetes or medication that depends on regular meals, that is a conversation for a doctor rather than an app.