Counting steps while your hands stay on the desk.
The watch's own step counter looks for arm swing. At a standing desk there is none — and so there are no steps. Padometer looks for something else: the tiny, strikingly regular tilting and twisting an arm still does while it rests on the table. All of it on the watch, with no account and no server.
Free on the App Store For the Apple Watch, free and without an account. It runs on the watch alone — your iPhone can stay on the desk.
Why another step counter
A treadmill under a desk only works if you get your work done while walking — your hand is on the keyboard or the mouse, and your arm barely moves. But that is exactly what the watch's step counter watches for. After an hour of walking, Health shows a few dozen steps, the rings look the way they did before, and the movement that actually happened appears nowhere.
The desk blocks the vertical travel of the body almost completely. What it does not block: with every step the arm tilts and twists around the point where it rests — a few tenths of a degree, barely above sensor noise, but strikingly regular. And regularity can be measured long after amplitude has given up.
What the app does
Three channels, not one
Up/down from the accelerometer, twist and tilt from the gyroscope. Which one carries the gait depends on how the arm happens to rest, so the app takes the clearest one and switches mid-session when your posture changes.
Periodicity, not amplitude
An autocorrelation over an eight-second window doesn't ask "was that loud enough" but "was that regular". Walking is strikingly sinusoidal, typing and mousing are not — which is why they get rejected even though they are far louder than the gait.
No lost start
It takes a few seconds to establish that someone really is walking. The steps from that window are parked and credited retroactively, instead of disappearing at the start of every walking bout.
The signal is visible
The signal screen shows each channel's confidence, its distance from the noise floor and the threshold as a tick on the bar. If it doesn't suit your desk, change the sensitivity — while walking, without ending the session.
A real workout
Padometer runs as a workout: it keeps counting when the screen goes dark and you switch to another app. Steps and distance are written by the app, heart rate and active calories are measured by the watch itself. The session ends up in Health.
A daily total that doesn't double-count
"Today" is what Health already knows plus what this session has counted but not written yet. The bar runs to the next full ten thousand and carries your goal as a tick.
How it goes
- Start. Watch on your wrist, hand on the desk, press start.
- Walk. After a few seconds the detector settles on a channel — the beginning is credited retroactively.
- Adjust, if needed. Counting too little: one step more sensitive. Counting your typing: one step stricter.
- Finish. The receipt shows steps, duration, distance, cadence and calories; the session lands in Health.
Specifications
- Channels
- 3 — up/down, twist, tilt
- Sampling
- 25 Hz, low pass at 5 Hz
- Analysis window
- 8 seconds of autocorrelation
- Detected range
- 54 – 204 steps/min
- Sensitivity
- Strict · Balanced · Sensitive
- Writes to Health
- Steps, distance, workout
- Requires
- Apple Watch, watchOS 26
Who it's for
For everyone who walks at their desk: a treadmill or walking pad under a sit-stand desk, calls and video meetings on the move, the half hour of email that would otherwise happen sitting down. And for everyone tired of an hour of walking looking exactly like an hour of sitting in Health.
What the app cannot do
- It is a detector, not a calibrated pedometer. The number is a good estimate, not an exact count.
- Distance is steps times the stride length from settings — your treadmill measures that better.
- A wobbly desktop also transmits the treadmill's own vibration; that is what the strict level is for. A very rigid one lets almost nothing through; that is what the sensitive level is for.
- Standing still doesn't count. That's deliberate: average cadence then tells you how much of the session you actually walked.
- When you walk with your arms swinging, the watch itself does better. Padometer is built for the case where it doesn't.
Privacy isn't an add-on
- No account, no sign-up, no login.
- No analytics, no tracking, no ads, no third-party SDKs.
- The app never calls an internet address on its own.
- Sensor data is evaluated in memory as it arrives and never stored — not on the watch, not anywhere else.
- What lands in Health is yours. Nobody, the developer included, gets to see it.