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KidneyKind is on the App Store in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and Japan as of May 2026. Direct links: US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, and Japan. The Japan release currently ships with an English UI plus Japan-aware content (JOTNW transplant pathway, Japanese-language kidney news feeds, PMDA-aware regulatory framing); full Japanese UI localization is the next planned milestone. Additional country expansions are planned — if your country isn't supported yet and you'd like it to be, send a quick email to [email protected] and Mike will add it to the list. Subscription pricing in non-US territories is set by Apple's regional price-tier conversion, and you'll see the local-currency price on the App Store before purchase.
KidneyKind is a subscription with a 14-day free trial. After your trial, pick the plan that works for you:
All four plans unlock exactly the same features — the only difference is how often you're billed. Cancel any time in Settings → [Your Name] → Subscriptions on your iPhone. No ads, no data sales, no middlemen. See the Terms of Service for full subscription details.
You keep read-only access to everything you've ever logged — dialysis sessions, vitals, labs, medications, fluid history, appointments, care team contacts, and your transplant journey remain fully viewable. Your care team contact cards still work, so you can tap to call, email, or get directions even if your subscription has lapsed.
You won't be able to log new entries until you resubscribe, but you're never locked out of your own health data. This is intentional — locking a dialysis patient out of their nephrologist's phone number because of a billing issue isn't acceptable to us.
Yes. Open Settings → Share & Export → Export My Data to generate a JSON file containing every record you've logged: all sessions, vitals, labs, medications, fluid drops, symptoms, appointments, care team contacts, transplant journey items, and saved recipes or articles. Save it to Files, email it to your nephrologist, or open it in a spreadsheet — it's your record to keep or share as you see fit. Export also works when your subscription is lapsed.
No account is required. KidneyKind uses your existing iCloud account (built into your iPhone) to sync data across your devices. Just download and go.
All your health data is stored in your private iCloud account. The developer cannot see or access your data. See the Privacy Policy for full details.
Yes — the app will store data locally on your device if you're not signed into iCloud or have iCloud disabled. Data will not sync across devices in this mode.
KidneyKind supports all four common modalities: PD Manual Exchanges, PD Cycler/APD, Home Hemodialysis, and Clinic Hemodialysis. You choose your primary modality during setup and can change it at any time in Settings. Clinic hemodialysis patients also get a dedicated Treatment Schedule editor for their recurring weekly pattern.
Open the Explore tab and tap the Resources segment. KidneyKind ships with a curated directory of US kidney organizations (NKF, AKF, AAKP, PKD Foundation, UNOS, NIDDK, Renal Support Network, and Kidney School — the Medical Education Institute's free 19-module patient education program) — each card opens the org's website in Safari. Below the foundations is a long-form guide to the kidney transplant evaluation process, written in plain language and grounded in public materials from UNOS, NKF, and NIDDK. The guide carries a clear "educational, not medical advice" disclaimer — it complements your conversations with your nephrology and transplant team, it doesn't replace them.
Open the Vitals tab and tap the Trends segment. You'll see a chart for every numeric vital (BP, weight, fluid intake, pulse) and every lab analyte (eGFR, potassium, phosphorus, hemoglobin, etc.) you've logged. Use the date range picker at the top to switch between 30 days, 90 days, 6 months, or 1 year. Lab charts shade the ideal range in teal and mark danger thresholds with dashed coral lines so out-of-range values pop visually.
Yes — appointments and your clinic hemodialysis treatment schedule are mirrored into your iOS Calendar via EventKit, with two-way sync for the events KidneyKind itself created. If you edit an appointment in KidneyKind, the calendar event updates; if you delete it, the calendar event is removed too. KidneyKind only ever reads or modifies events it created itself — it never touches your other calendar events. Permission is requested the first time you save an appointment, and is optional. If you decline, appointments still save locally and reminder notifications still fire, just without the calendar mirror.
Yes. Open Settings → Appearance and pick System, Light, or Dark. The whole app switches instantly — no relaunch needed.
Yes. Open Track → Log Session → PD Cycler. The form has three distinct sections: a Cycler Program stepper for the number of dwell cycles and the fill volume per cycle (these are independent — one 6,000 mL bag commonly feeds multiple dwells), a Bag Supply section where you pick the solution type (Dianeal, Balance, Extraneal, Nutrineal, Other) and bag size, and an optional Last Fill section. For dextrose-based solutions you get four counter rows — 1.25%, 1.5%, 2.5%, 4.25% — with the standard Baxter bag colors, so you can log a session like "3× 6,000 mL Dianeal — 2× 2.5% green + 1× 4.25% red" exactly as it ran. For fixed-concentration solutions like Icodextrin (Extraneal) and Amino Acid (Nutrineal), the strength picker disappears and you just enter the bag count. The optional last-fill section has a toggle for patients who run dry at the end and auto-defaults the solution to whatever you picked for the cycler.
Yes. Once your modality is set to Clinic Hemodialysis in Settings, a new "Treatment Schedule" link appears. There you can pick your treatment days (e.g., Mon/Wed/Fri), start time, duration, clinic name, and how far in advance you want to be reminded. KidneyKind schedules a repeating local notification for each treatment day and writes a recurring event into your iOS Calendar.
Yes — open Vitals → Labs → + Log Lab Result and you'll find a Dialysis Adequacy section with a Kt/V field. The label and explanation adapt to your modality: PD patients see Kt/V with a footer explaining the quarterly clearance study and the KDOQI minimum of 1.7. HD patients see spKt/V (per session) with the KDOQI target of ≥ 1.4. Enter the value from your clearance report, tap Save, and the Kt/V shows up on your lab row with an automatic flag if it's below the adequacy floor for your modality, on the Vitals → Trends chart with an ideal band, on the Visit Summary PDF, and on the Share Health Update snapshot. This is the number that matters most for whether you're getting enough dialysis to adequately clean your blood — now it's tracked alongside all your other labs in one place.
Yes — KidneyKind ships with a real Apple Watch companion app, not a notification mirror. After installing the iPhone app from TestFlight or the App Store, the watch app installs automatically on your paired Apple Watch. Three views sync in real-time with the iPhone via your private iCloud account: a fluid intake gauge with three big preset buttons (+ Cup 237 mL, + Bottle 473 mL, + Glass 118 mL) for one-tap logging from the wrist, with a haptic confirmation each tap; today's medication doses sorted earliest first with tap-to-mark-taken (color-coded coral for pending, teal for taken, grey for skipped); and a vitals snapshot showing your latest blood pressure and weight at a glance. Drops you log on the watch sync to the iPhone within seconds, and vice versa — your iPhone Visit Summary PDF, trend charts, and Home Screen widget all reflect what you logged on the wrist.
KidneyKind ships with two watch face complications you can pin directly to your favorite face:
To add one, on your Apple Watch long-press the watch face, tap Edit, swipe to the complications row, tap a slot, scroll to KidneyKind in the alphabetical list, and pick whichever complication fits the slot. Both complications update within seconds of logging anything on the iPhone or the watch — they don't wait for the next 30-minute timeline refresh because the snapshot writer fires `WidgetCenter.shared.reloadAllTimelines()` after every save.
If your primary modality is PD Cycler or PD Combined, the Track tab shows a moon icon next to the + button. Tap it to open a quick bedtime checklist before you hook up. The checklist walks through hygiene (hand washing and surgical mask — the two biggest peritonitis-prevention steps), exit site care (appearance, cleaned, antibiotic cream), session medications (heparin/antibiotics/none), and the cycler program (cycles, fill volume, solution type, bag setup, last fill). All of the cycler program values are pre-populated from your most recent session, so repeat patients breeze through in under a minute. Tap Start Session and KidneyKind captures the current time as the session start and creates a draft. In the morning, tap the draft in the Track list to finish it — the existing cycler form opens with everything you entered last night already in place, and you just add the total UF and any alarms before saving. Catches mistakes that exhausted brains miss, and saves you the work of re-entering your nightly setup.
Yes — open Vitals → Daily Vitals → Log Vitals, scroll to the Symptoms section, and tap any symptom chip to select it. When selected, an inline editor appears with a 1–5 severity slider (Mild → Severe with color-coded labels that shift from teal to amber to coral) and a trigger multi-select covering 13 common dialysis-patient causes: after a meal, dehydration, missed dialysis, long dwell, low BP, high BP, fluid overload, electrolyte imbalance, medication side effect, sleep deprivation, stress, exercise, and unknown. Editing a previously-logged day pre-loads the severity and triggers so you can update rather than start fresh. Open Vitals → Trends to see a symptom frequency chart showing total count of each symptom over the selected date range, plus a list of your most recent entries with severity badges. Patterns that aren't obvious from a single day become visible over weeks and months — useful for figuring out which foods or activities trigger which symptoms.
Yes — open Explore → Resources. KidneyKind ships with four long-form patient education guides written in plain language for dialysis patients:
Every guide opens in a clean reader view with sections you can scroll through, a "this is educational, not medical advice" disclaimer at the top, and a "Where to learn more" section pointing to external resources. They're not a substitute for your nephrology team — they're a starting point so you can have better conversations with them.
On the Home tab, the fluid intake gauge card has two inline quick-add buttons — Cup · 237 mL and Bottle · 473 mL. One tap logs that amount immediately with no navigation. The gauge updates live and the Home Screen widget reflects the change within seconds. For other sizes, tap the More button (or tap the gauge card itself) to open the full Fluid Intake sheet, which has a 6-button grid covering Small glass (4 oz / 118 mL), Cup (8 oz / 237 mL), Can or mug (12 oz / 355 mL), Water bottle (16 oz / 473 mL), Bottle (500 mL), and Liter (1,000 mL) — plus a custom mL input row for anything else. Every drop you log is stamped with the time and appears in the Today's drops list in the same sheet, so you can tap any entry to remove it if you mis-tapped. The sheet also shows a color-shifting gauge (teal → amber → coral as you approach your daily limit), warning banners at 80% and 100%, and a haptic buzz on crossing each threshold so low-energy patients feel the alert without reading the screen.
Yes — open Settings → Share & Export → Share Health Update. Add an optional personal note at the top ("Hi Mom, just sending you my update for today" or "Hi Dr. Smith, quick check-in before our visit"), toggle which sections to include (today's vitals, most recent dialysis session, next appointment, active medications, most recent labs, transplant journey, coordinator contact), and tap Generate Health Update. A single-page PDF with your name, the selected sections, and a clean KidneyKind-branded layout is built on your device. Then tap Share Update and pick Messages, Mail, AirDrop, or any other app from the system share sheet — the PDF is a proper file, so Save to PDF and Open in Preview work too. This is different from the multi-page Visit Summary PDF: Share Health Update is a lightweight right-now snapshot for quick messages between visits, whereas Visit Summary is a comprehensive report with trend charts for your nephrology appointments.
Yes, if you're a PD Cycler or PD Combined user. Open Settings → Cycler and flip the Morning cycler reminder toggle on. Grant notification permission if prompted, then pick a time (default 9:00 AM — after most people are up). Every morning at that time you'll get a gentle notification: "Good morning — whenever you have a moment, feel free to log last night's cycler session. No rush." Tap the notification to jump straight to the Track tab. The reminder is deliberately framed as non-nagging — no "you forgot" language, no pressure. If you already logged last night's session, just ignore it. Turn it off anytime in Settings. The section only appears for cycler users; other modalities don't see it at all.
Yes — open Settings → About You (first section at the top). Enter your full name, a preferred name (what you'd rather be called day-to-day — e.g. "Mike" if your chart says "Michael"), your sex (Prefer not to say, Male, Female, Other), and optionally your date of birth. Tap Save. All fields are optional. Once you set a preferred name, the Home dashboard greets you personally ("Good afternoon, Mike"), the Visit Summary PDF cover page gets a proper patient identification block with your name / DOB / sex, and the Share Health Update PDF shows your name under the title. Hemoglobin and creatinine lab reference ranges are also sex-aware — men and women have slightly different ideal bands for those two analytes — so setting your sex refines the flagging where it's clinically meaningful. All of this lives in your private iCloud account and is never shared.
KidneyKind ships with four Home Screen widgets — Fluid Intake, Next Medication, Next Appointment, and the large KidneyKind Dashboard. To add one: long-press an empty area of your Home Screen (or the wallpaper) until the icons start wiggling, tap Edit in the top-left corner, then tap Add Widget, search for KidneyKind in the widget gallery, pick the size you want (small, medium, or large), and tap Add Widget. You can place widgets on the Home Screen, on the Today View (swipe right from your first page of apps), or pinned to your Lock Screen. Tapping any widget deep-links you straight to the matching tab in the app. The widgets update automatically within seconds of logging a vital, taking a medication dose, or adding an appointment — no waiting for a 30-minute refresh. If a widget looks empty the first time you add it, open the app once so it can populate the snapshot.
Fluid Intake (small + medium) shows a circular gauge with today's fluid intake vs. your daily limit; the color shifts from teal to amber to coral as you approach the limit. Next Medication (small + medium) shows your next pending dose today — name, dose amount, time, and how many doses you have left for the day, with a friendly "All caught up" state when you've handled every dose. Next Appointment (small + medium) shows your next upcoming visit — title, date, time, location — with a mini calendar card on the medium size. KidneyKind Dashboard (large) is the pride-of-place widget that combines fluid, next dose, next appointment, and your current transplant phase in a single tile. All four are privacy-preserving: widgets only read from a small local cache shared between the app and the widget extension, with no network access and no new data collected.
Yes — this is the app's flagship feature for transplant candidates. Open Settings → Transplant → Transplant Journey (or tap the Transplant Journey card in Explore → Resources → My Journey). On your first visit you'll see a welcome screen that lets you either seed the standard workup (30 common evaluation items across 8 clinical categories — consultations, bloodwork including HLA typing and PRA, imaging, cardiac, cancer screens, dental, psychosocial, financial) or start from scratch. From there you can update your phase (Not Started, Referred, In Evaluation, Committee Review, Listed, On Hold, Matched, Transplanted), enter your transplant center and coordinator contact info, set key dates (referral, first visit, committee review, listing date, wait-time start date, transplant date), work through the evaluation checklist (tap any status icon to cycle Pending → Scheduled → Completed in one tap, or tap the row for the full editor with notes and N/A), and log PRA/cPRA results over time with an automatic trend chart. The status card shows a one-line plain-language explainer for each phase so you always know what that phase means, and there's a one-tap call and email button for your coordinator right on the dashboard. Nothing leaves your device — transplant data syncs through your private iCloud like everything else.
This is one of the most important things for transplant candidates to understand. Your wait-time start date is when the UNOS clock started counting for your waitlist position — which for most US kidney transplant candidates is the date you started dialysis, or the date your eGFR first dropped below 20, whichever is earlier. Your listing date is when the transplant center officially added you to the UNOS list, which usually happens months later after you complete the workup. The wait-time start date is what determines your actual position on the list — not the listing date. Ask your transplant coordinator to confirm which date UNOS has on file for you, because mistakes here can cost you years. KidneyKind's Transplant Journey tracker has a separate field for each date so you can verify both and see the gap.
Yes — open Settings → Care Team → Care Team Contacts. Tap the + in the top right to add your nephrologist, PD nurse, HD nurse, dietician, social worker, transplant coordinator, pharmacist, mental health provider, primary care doctor, or any caregiver/family member. Each contact stores name, role, practice/clinic, phone, email, structured office location (with the same MapKit picker the Appointments editor uses), and notes. Contacts are grouped by role in the list view, and every row has quick-action chips for Call, Email, and Directions — chips only appear for the fields that are populated. Each contact has an optional Sync to iOS Contacts toggle in the editor. When enabled, KidneyKind mirrors that single contact to your iOS Contacts so you can call, text, email, and get directions from the system Phone, Messages, Mail, and Maps apps too — and so the contact shows up in Siri suggestions, CarPlay, and Apple Watch. Sync is per-contact, opt-in, and strictly one-way out: KidneyKind never reads, scans, or imports from your iOS Contacts.
Yes — open Settings → Apple Health and toggle Sync with Apple Health. iOS will show you the standard HealthKit permission sheet listing nine data types: blood pressure, body mass, heart rate, body temperature plus five symptoms (fatigue, nausea, headache, dizziness, shortness of breath). Grant whichever ones you want. From then on, KidneyKind will: (1) read those data types from Apple Health on every launch and merge them into your daily vitals, so anything your Withings scale or Omron BP cuff or Apple Watch writes shows up automatically; and (2) write back any vital you log manually so other apps see the same numbers. Manual entries are never overwritten, KidneyKind never reads samples it wrote itself (no duplicates from the round-trip), and three of KidneyKind's symptoms (cramping, swelling, low BP episode) stay app-only because HealthKit has no equivalent category.
Yes — open Settings → Visit Summary PDF. Pick a date range (30 / 90 / 180 days) and tap Generate. KidneyKind builds a clean, multi-page printable PDF with your latest values on the cover, trend charts for every vital and lab, the most recent lab draw with out-of-range values flagged, your active medication list, recent dialysis sessions, and any upcoming appointments. Tap Share PDF and the system share sheet lets you email it, AirDrop it, save it to Files, or send it to any other app. The PDF is generated entirely on your device — nothing leaves until you choose to share it.
Please email [email protected] — feature requests from real patients are how this app gets better. Every message is read by Mike, the developer.
Email and Mike (the developer, also a dialysis patient) will get back to you, usually within 24–48 hours.
[email protected]