Kinoku Reviews and Details

Questions & Answers

1. What makes Kinoku unique?

   Kinoku brings custom workouts, gym programs, lifts, GPS runs, activities, classes, daily steps, and home workouts into one private place on your phone. Because every activity shares the same history, the muscle recovery map and fatigue curves reflect your whole week of training, not just what happened inside a single niche app.

   There are no accounts to create and no Kinoku servers holding your data. Android backs up your app data to your personal Google Drive in the background, and you can export a full, lossless ZIP archive at any time. The free tier is a complete app with zero ads, unlimited workouts, unlimited routines, and 15 built-in training programs. Every score the app calculates has its formula and scientific citations published openly on the website. The boundaries are real too: Android and Wear OS only, no social feed, and no proprietary cloud servers syncing between devices in real time.

   And I dare say the analytics and visualisation part is why I built this and for me the most usefull and standout part of the app.

2. What's the story behind Kinoku?

   I built Kinoku because training in more than one way meant juggling three apps and living with blind spots. Squats went into a weightlifting log, runs went into a GPS app that drew maps, and mobility work was a follow-along video on the TV that went unrecorded. By Sunday, the lifting app claimed our legs had not been trained since Tuesday. And I wanted all of that kept and shown in a more visual way, thus the muscle map feature, showing what's been hit in 3 different ways, how often, how hard and time based recovery, so I can be as ad hoc with my daily exercises or as strict as I want based on a glance off the app.

   As an independent developer, I built Kinoku around the device itself: all training stored locally, no corporate accounts, and a recovery engine that weighs Wednesday's heavy deadlifts alongside Saturday's long run. I'm sick of apps requesting login and data and going out of sync and asking for login again each week, I want a simple way to access my stuff, on my own terms, this was one of the other big motivators, as I come from using FitNotes for many years. Also, yeah, FitNotes is great but outdated, Kinoku is inspired by it and expanded in many ways.

   The name combines kinesis (movement) and oku (depth). The long-form background is published on our Substack in the essay, "Most training apps only count one kind of training."

3. Why should a person choose Kinoku over its competitors?

   Choose Kinoku if you train in more than one discipline and want to own your training data without paying a monthly tax.

   Most workout apps cap your routines behind paywalls (like Strong's three-template limit or Hevy's four-routine cap) or fund themselves through social feeds and ads. Kinoku’s free plan gives you unlimited workouts, unlimited routines, 15 structured program templates (such as 5/3/1 and GZCLP), a training calendar, GPS run tracking, Health Connect integration, and a standalone Wear OS app. What ships free stays free.

   Pro adds depth for serious athletes: running pace analytics, 80/20 zone training, readiness scores based on HRV and sleep, per-muscle volume landmarks, and the Pro Analytics hub. If you train primarily to share photos and compare yourself with friends on a social feed, a platform like Hevy or Strava is a better fit. Kinoku is built for quiet, private training.

4. How would you describe the primary audience of Kinoku?

   Intermediate-to-advanced lifters, runners, and hybrid athletes who care about tracking rigor and data privacy.

   A typical user tracks barbell sets with effort ratings (RPE) and reps in reserve (RIR), checks muscle volume recovery before their next session, or logs outdoor tempo runs. They want capable analytics without having to create an account, look at ads, or pay a monthly subscription just to log a fourth routine. It also fits lifters who train in home gyms, follow video sessions, or run outdoor routes, because all of those sessions feed into the same recovery stats. It is not built for casual users looking for a social network or anyone needing an iOS app.

5. Which are the primary technologies used for building Kinoku?

   Kinoku is built natively for Android using Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, with Room SQLite handling local storage and Hilt for dependency injection. The standalone Wear OS companion app runs as its own module and communicates with the phone via the Wearable DataLayer.

   Map rendering uses MapLibre with offline vector tiles, weather checks use an opt-in call to Open-Meteo, and Google Health Connect syncs data to and from supported fitness devices. Google Play handles licensing and subscriptions. Telemetry and crash reports use Firebase, which are strictly disabled by default until the user explicitly turns them on in privacy settings.

6. Who are some of the biggest customers of Kinoku?

   • Kinoku is an offline consumer app built for individual athletes, not enterprise companies.
   • Powerlifters and strength trainees running structured percentage programs like 5/3/1, GZCLP, and nSuns.
   • Hybrid athletes and distance runners tracking barbell fatigue and GPS road miles in one unified recovery log.
   • Home gym and garage gym lifters tracking barbells, kettlebells, and bodyweight movements offline.
   • Privacy-conscious trainees who avoid mandatory accounts, corporate cloud servers, and commercial telemetry.