# Why I built Anlo: making sure the pain wasn't for nothing

> A lung resection, a stubborn infection, grief and three kids at home. How Anlo started as the tool I needed to take back control of my health, privately.

Last year an unexpected health crisis put me on an operating table for a major lung resection. Afterwards I started long-term, high-intensity targeted therapy.

I assumed that if I followed the regimen strictly, things would settle down. They didn't. Six months in, my suppressed immune system gave way to a severe, stubborn fungal infection, and the drugs for the two conditions interfered with each other's metabolism. My doctors paused my main treatment to fight the infection.

Life doesn't break in neat chapters. Everything hit at once.

At the height of the infection, my father-in-law died suddenly, and I dragged my sick body across the country for the funeral. Right after, both of my parents were hospitalized at the same time. I went back and forth between their wards, barely able to breathe myself, while three young children waited at home and the bills kept coming.

Grief, caregiving, illness and money worries took my sleep, often down to four hours a night. My metabolism gave out. My joints and muscles ached so much that my fingers were too weak to press down, and I gained 10 kilograms.

Then a routine check-up came back with uric acid, blood lipids and liver function all in the red, and another stack of prescriptions.

Looking at the pills and the numbers, one thing was clear: **I'm a father of three and my family leans on me. I couldn't afford to collapse. I had to take back control of my body.**

I'm a solo developer who builds with AI and has cared about privacy for a long time. My instinct was to fight back the way I know how: by writing code. So I built Anlo.

## Built by being my own test subject

There was no business plan. The goal was simple: **something I could use right away to get better.**

Exhausted and short on time, I knew forms and spreadsheets wouldn't survive a week. So Anlo is built around doing as little as possible:

- **Photo and voice instead of typing.** On days when my hands hurt, typing was too much. Snap your plate, a nutrition label or a lab report, or hold the button and just say what you ate. Anlo estimates the calories and nutrients, and you can correct anything.
- **What to eat next, not just what you ate.** The point isn't a perfect diary. It's knowing, right now, what your next meal should be given today's numbers, your targets and how you slept.
- **It knows your situation.** People recovering from surgery, on several medications or under long-term stress aren't a factory preset. Anlo keeps your medications, medical events and lab results next to your meals, sets targets for your situation, and its coach lines your meals up with your numbers. Patterns to discuss with your doctor, never a diagnosis and never medication advice.
- **Apple Health.** My workouts are a daily 5 km brisk walk now, not the gym. Anlo reads weight, blood pressure, blood sugar, workouts, sleep and resting heart rate from Health, and saves meals and readings back, so what I burn and what I eat stay in one loop.
- **Four languages from day one:** English, Español, 日本語 and 中文.

## Privacy by design: your key, your health data

I know how fragile health data is, and I won't treat anyone's medical history as raw material.

- **Your log stays on your phone.** Meals, photos, labs and medications live on your iPhone, not on our servers.
- **The AI reads, then forgets.** When you ask the AI to read a photo or answer a question, it gets only what that task needs, answers, and nothing is kept or used to train models.
- **No email, no password.** Your account is a key only you hold, like a self-custody wallet. Back it up to iCloud Keychain or write down the 24-word phrase.
- **Sync is optional and end-to-end encrypted.** Everything is encrypted on your phone before it's uploaded; our server can't read it. Turn it off and export backups by hand instead.
- **No ads, no trackers in the app,** and your data is never sold or shared.

The AI and the servers cost money to run, so that part of Anlo will be a subscription. That's the whole business model: no ads, no data deals.

## Why 14 days?

Lab numbers don't lie, and you can't rebuild your health on impressions.

Recovery needs short feedback loops you can measure. Fourteen days is long enough to see whether my daily changes (water, the daily walk, calories, the medication schedule) are actually moving my numbers back toward safe ranges, and short enough to adjust before I lose heart. Every entry feeds the next practical step.

There's a lot I still don't know about this road. But by building in the open, **I want to turn this chapter into something that helps other people, and make sure none of this pain was for nothing.**

— Anton