Tiiks vs Steed: Strava-Native Wear vs Apple Health Guesswork

Steed is a private maintenance log that imports Apple Health. Tiiks is a Strava-native wear record. One stays on the phone. The other follows the part.

You finish a ride, the watch writes it into Apple Health, and a maintenance app on the same phone tries to turn that file into chain wear. Sometimes the file is a bike ride. Sometimes it is a walk that still has a GPS trace. Sometimes it is an indoor trainer session with no bike attached at all. The import is not the hard part. Knowing what the kilometers belong to is.

Steed, titled Bike Maintenance Log, is an iOS app that takes that Health import seriously and then stays out of your business. No account. No ads. No subscription for the core log. You can also type rides by hand and assign them to a bike or a wheelset. Tiiks starts from a different file: the Strava activity that already knows it was a ride, on a bike, with a distance you already trust.

Both apps want you to stop guessing when the chain was last replaced. They just disagree about where the truth lives. Steed treats privacy and a local log as the product. We treat automatic wear on named parts as the product. If you want a quiet notebook that never phones home, Steed is built for that. If you want the kilometers to land without a Health mapping session, that is a different app. The mapping session is the part people forget they signed up for: every indoor ride, every borrowed bike, every week the watch was in a drawer.

What Steed actually is

Steed is a maintenance log first. You add the parts riders actually consume: chains, cassettes, tires, pads, sealant, hydraulic bleeds, chain wax. You point rides at a bike or a wheelset so a winter set of wheels does not inflate the summer tires. Distance can come from Apple Health or from your thumbs. The core of that loop does not require an account, does not show ads, and does not ask for a subscription.

The extras sit behind a lifetime unlock: more bikes, widgets, cost tracking. That is a one-time commercial door, not a monthly meter, and it is optional if one bike and the basic log are enough. The design is private on purpose. Your garage is not a cloud profile. The tradeoff is equally on purpose. Steed is not Strava-native. If your riding life already lives on Strava, Health is a second-hand copy of that life, with Apple's activity types and your watch's opinions in the middle.

What Strava-native wear looks like

Tiiks is native on iOS and Android. You connect Strava once. Rides sync without a Health bridge and without a manual paste after every loop. Each mounted component gets the distance from the rides that happened while it was on the bike. A wheelset swap is a parts problem, not an Apple-category problem. We already know which bike the activity was on because Strava gear and the bike in Tiiks are the same story.

The rest of the record is what a log rarely becomes. A real parts catalog names the chain. Verified rider reviews sit on those names with real mileage, so you are not the first person to guess how a cassette dies. The home-screen widget shows wear without opening anything. Service and replace stay separate. When a part comes off, it stays in the bike's history instead of vanishing into a deleted row. That is a living garage, not a private spreadsheet with nicer typography.

Apple Health import vs rides that already have a bike

Apple Health is a locker, not a bike computer. It holds workouts from a watch, a third-party app, a treadmill, and the occasional ride you forgot to start. Steed can import that locker and let you assign what came in. That is honest work, and it is still guesswork at the edges: indoor rides, walks that look like rides, two bikes sharing one watch, a wheelset that Health has never heard of. You become the filter.

Strava is already the filter most riders use. The activity has a type, a distance, and usually a bike. Tiiks reads that and applies it to the parts that were mounted. You are not reconciling Health samples on Sunday night. You are not deciding whether a 'cycling' workout on a hotel spin bike should age the chain on the gravel bike in the hallway. The file was a ride. The wear follows the ride.

A private log on the phone vs a history that follows the bike

Steed's privacy stance is a real feature, not a slogan. No account means there is no Steed cloud waiting to be breached, sold, or forgotten. If you lose the phone and have no backup, you lose the log — that is the other side of the same coin. For a rider who wants maintenance data to stay in the pocket, that trade is rational. It is also a ceiling. A history that lives only on one device is hard to open on Android, hard to share with a shop, and easy to strand when you change phones.

Tiiks keeps the history with the account you already use to sign in, on iOS and Android. That is more surface area than a local-only log. It is also how a part that left the bike in March still has a mileage when you ask about it in October. We are not a surveillance product. We are a wear record that has to survive a cracked screen. If your requirement is that nobody's server ever sees a chain install, Steed is the stricter answer. If your requirement is that the chain's life outlives the handset, it is not.

Chains and wax you type in vs parts with a real identity

Steed's part list is the list a home mechanic actually touches: wax dates, sealant, pads, bleeds. That is more honest than a garage that only knows a frame. What those rows usually lack is a catalog identity. A chain is not the same object as a named 12-speed model with reviews from riders who put four thousand kilometers on it. Tiiks starts from that identity. You still log the service. You also know what you installed, and what other people did to the same part before it died. Wax dates still belong in a log. They just belong next to a part that has a name, not next to a blank row you will not recognize next spring.

Lifetime extras vs a widget that already shows wear

Steed's widgets and extra bikes sit in the lifetime unlock. That is a clean commercial line: pay once if you outgrow one bike. Tiiks ships the home-screen widget as part of the wear product, not as a trophy for unlocking the garage. You glance at the chain before you leave the house. You do not open a log, remember to import Health, and then hope you assigned the ride to the right wheelset. Extra bikes in Tiiks are still bikes with parts and history, not a feature flag.

Who each app fits

Pick Steed if you want a quiet iOS log, you are willing to import Apple Health or type rides, and you like that nobody asked you to create an account. You maintain wax, sealant, and pads on a short list of bikes, and a lifetime unlock for widgets or costs feels fair. You do not need Android. You do not need a parts catalog. Privacy is the feature you would miss if it went away.

Pick Tiiks if Strava is already the source of truth and you are tired of translating it through Health. You want per-component mileage, a catalog, reviews with real distance, service versus replace, and a widget that does not hide behind a lifetime paywall. You ride on iPhone or Android. You want the history to follow the bike, not the handset you happened to own this year.

Questions we get

Does Steed sync with Strava?

No. Steed is not Strava-native. Distance comes from Apple Health or from manual entry, then you assign rides to a bike or wheelset. If Strava is where you already file every ride, Health is a copy of that file with extra activity types in the mix. That can work. It is not a sync.

Do you need an account to use Tiiks?

Yes. Tiiks is an account-backed app on iOS and Android so the bike history can follow you across devices. That is a different privacy shape than Steed's no-account design. We use it to keep parts, services, and Strava-linked mileage together — not to turn a chain install into a social post.

Is Steed enough if you only have one bike?

For a single bike and a disciplined Health import, Steed's core log can cover chains, cassettes, tires, pads, sealant, bleeds, and wax without paying anyone. The gaps show up when you want named catalog parts, rider reviews, Android, automatic Strava wear, or a widget that is part of the product instead of an unlock. One bike does not make those gaps disappear. It just makes them quieter.

If a private notebook on iOS is the whole job, Steed already does that job without asking for an account. If the job is wear that arrives from Strava onto real parts, with a history you can open on either phone, that is what we built. Put the bike in Tiiks and stop translating Apple Health into a cassette.