HRTMe, a free-to-download iPhone and Apple Watch app that reminds women to take their hormone replacement therapy (HRT), has been used by around 1,400 women, who have between them logged nearly 19,000 doses — and the number of women using it each month has more than doubled since March. The app is built and run by Jane McKay, an iOS developer who is herself on HRT, and is published by Forgeyard Digital.
"Most women don't even realise that technology can help them here, and I'd like to change that," says McKay.
Remarkably, every one of those ~1,400 women found HRTMe organically — with zero marketing or promotion — and the number using it each month has still more than doubled since March. Women, in other words, are seeking this out blind: proof that the need is real and unmet.
The figures point to a problem that has been hiding in plain sight. The most common setup in HRTMe is two medications, not one — and around two-thirds of women using it are managing two or more, with some juggling five, six or seven. The single most common regimen women set up is a phased or cyclical schedule: the complicated kind that shifts across the month — gel in the morning, progesterone only on certain nights, a patch twice a week — that ordinary reminder apps cannot handle.
"The problem was never wanting to take my HRT," says McKay. "It was remembering it in the middle of a busy life, on a regimen that genuinely changes halfway through the month. So I built the reminder I wished existed."
HRTMe supports the widest range of HRT regimens of any reminder app — every delivery form (patch, gel, spray, tablet, capsule, pessary, cream, coil, injection and implant) plus phased and cyclical schedules — with guided setup for dozens of UK and US brands. Reminders are sleep-aware, so they don't wake women in the night, and a GP report turns a woman's own logs into something she can take into an appointment; more than 100 such reports have already been generated.
Crucially, HRTMe is private by default. There is no account and no sign-up: a woman's HRT details are stored on her own phone, never sold, and never used to train anyone's AI. An optional iCloud backup keeps a copy in the woman's own iCloud if she chooses. The only analytics the app collects are anonymous, aggregate usage patterns that contain no health data — which is exactly where the figures in this announcement come from.
The app is deliberately built for women. "I made HRTMe for us — unapologetically, for women," says McKay. "Your HRT and your symptoms are nobody else's business, which is why everything stays on your own phone."
The engagement is unusually high for a consumer health app: roughly three in four women who open HRTMe in a given week actively log a dose, and around seven in ten are still using it a week after they start. There is no venture capital behind it — McKay built it for herself while caring for terminally ill parents and managing her own HRT, then opened it up when her sister, and then her friends, asked to use it too. McKay spent 8 years at Dyson, latterly as a Senior Software Engineering Manager, before building HRTMe independently.
HRTMe is free to download on the App Store now, for iPhone (iOS 16 and later) and Apple Watch. The core — tracking your HRT and getting your reminders — is free, always. An optional subscription (Essential or Complete) unlocks extras such as symptom and bleed tracking, deeper insights, the GP report, Apple Watch features and iCloud backup, with a 7-day free trial of Complete.
Note to editors: HRTMe is a medication-reminder and wellbeing-tracking tool. It does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, and the figures above describe usage behaviour, not health outcomes. Always follow your prescribing clinician's instructions.