The best pushup app for home workouts is the one that fits your floor space, your device and the thing you actually keep failing at — because at home there is no equipment to buy and nobody watching your depth. On iPhone, a camera counter that checks range of motion is the strongest answer to the honesty problem; if you own an Apple Watch and would rather not put a phone on the floor at all, a watch-based counter fits better; and if you are on Android, most of the apps on this page are iPhone-only — though our own is not.
Disclosure, second paragraph on purpose: pushup.quest is published by the makers of Pushup RPG, a free iOS and Android pushup and squat counter. We are not a neutral review site and you should read us as an interested party. What we can promise: every competitor fact below was read off that app's own public US App Store listing on 27 July 2026 and nothing else; we have not run a head-to-head accuracy test, so we do not rank anyone on counting accuracy; and we name the readers our own app is wrong for, starting with anyone who needs an Apple Watch.
What "at home" actually changes
Home training has four constraints that gym training does not, and they are the whole reason app choice matters here.
- No equipment. Nothing to buy. This is a feature, not a limitation — pushups already scale from wall to incline to floor to decline without a single piece of kit. See the beginner progression guide for the ladder.
- Limited space. A pushup needs roughly your body length by your arm span of clear floor. A camera counter may need considerably more than that, depending on where the phone has to sit.
- Nobody is watching. No coach, no training partner, no gym mirror. Depth can quietly shrink over weeks while the number in your head keeps climbing.
- The novelty wears off. Once the numbers stop jumping, the living room floor is a very easy place to skip.
An app is worth installing only if it fixes at least one of these. Work out which one is your problem before you install anything.
How much space each counting method needs
This is the question that decides most home setups, so here it is as a table. Everything in the examples column comes from each app's own US App Store listing, checked July 2026.
| Method | What it needs at home | Examples (checked July 2026) | Caveats |
|---|---|---|---|
| Camera watching you from across the room | Floor for the pushup plus enough distance for the lens to see you. Count Pushups with Camera's listing asks for roughly two metres, device level on the floor, entire body visible. Top Pushup's asks for the phone at floor level facing your side profile, head to feet. | Pushup RPG (front camera, on-device pose detection), Top Pushup, Count Pushups with Camera, Puuush (ARKit camera counting on iPhone), CounterUps (camera mode with adaptive calibration) | Rooms where you cannot back the phone off far enough to match the setup its listing describes |
| Camera reading your face, or the distance to it, with the phone close in | Almost no extra floor. PushCount's listing has the phone lying flat beneath your chest; pushr counts by tracking your face on the TrueDepth camera as you look at the phone. Neither listing describes backing the device away from you. | PushCount (face distance to a phone lying beneath the chest; listing states camera data is processed locally on the device and never uploaded), pushr (TrueDepth facial tracking), CounterUps (distance-sensor mode) | The trigger is your head, or its distance, rather than a whole-body view, per the listings. We have not tested what that means in practice. |
| Apple Watch motion sensing | No phone placement at all. Just floor. | Puuush (gyroscope and accelerometer; listing says no calibration required, either wrist, any orientation), CounterUps (gravity detection), Rep Up for Watch (recognises the repeating motion pattern and detects when you stop) | Rep Up for Watch is a general strength rep counter that names push-ups among supported movements, not a push-up specialist. We have run no wrist-versus-camera comparison. |
| Manual tap or voice | Nothing | CounterUps (Manual Click and Voice Recognition modes) | It counts what you tell it, so it records your honesty rather than checking it |
If your training spot is a strip of carpet between a sofa and a coffee table, the second row is your row. If you have a wall you can lean a phone against and a couple of metres of clearance, the first row opens up. One caveat on the whole table: only Count Pushups with Camera and Top Pushup spell out a setup position on their listings, so for everything else — ours included — treat placement as something to test in your own room rather than something to assume.
The honesty problem, which is the real home problem
Counting is trivial. Counting honestly, alone, for months, is not. Range of motion is what tends to erode first: the rep gets shorter, the number gets bigger, and nothing in the room disagrees with you.
That is the specific thing we built Pushup RPG around. It counts pushups and squats through the front camera with on-device pose detection, and it counts only full-range reps — depth decides, so reps cannot be padded. No video, image or pose data is recorded, stored or transmitted, and there is no server anywhere in the counting loop, which matters more than usual when a camera is pointed at your living room. Squats arrived in v2.0 with their own separate leaderboard; pushup and squat records are never pooled.
We do not publish a required camera distance, so treat setup as something to test rather than trust: prop the phone where your upper body is clearly in frame, do a set of twenty counting them yourself, and see whether the app agrees. Do that with any counter you try, ours included. And whatever the count says, stop the set on sharp joint pain in the wrist, elbow or shoulder — that is a stop signal, not something to train through. The form guide covers the positions that usually cause it.
After the novelty wears off
Every app here will count a rep. The difference at home shows up on the evening you do not feel like training.
Our answer is to make the training the game: 48 foes across 8 biomes, character classes, a skill tree, loot, daily quests, and streaks that include a streak freeze and a guided rest day so one missed night does not end the run. There are Fellowships — guilds — with a weekly co-op boss and camera-counted leaderboards, which is the closest thing to a training partner you get in an empty room. Upgrades boost XP, gold, drop rates and your damage per rep, so better gear fells a foe in fewer reps — what it will not do is log a session you did not do, which is the part that matters when the room is effects.
Apple Health sync is opt-in and write-only: the app requests zero read permissions and makes no health queries at all. It writes one workout of type functional strength training per session plus a conservative active-energy estimate, and buffers consecutive battles into a single workout so your Health app is not littered with two-minute entries. If you want an app that reads your Health data and adapts to it, ours does not do that.
Competitors approach the motivation problem differently: Puuush's listing describes programs, challenges, leaderboards and workout history, and CounterUps builds a personalised plan from your height, weight, age and gender. Whether a plan or a game holds you longer is a question about you, not about the software.
The honest alternative: a notebook
A notebook plus a plan is a legitimate answer to this entire page, and for some people a better one. It costs nothing, needs no charge, works in any room, and never asks for camera permission. If you already train consistently and only want a record, buy a cheap pad and write the date, the sets and the reps. The reasons to add an app instead are narrow and specific: you want depth actually checked, you want counting to be hands-free, or you want something external pulling you back on the bad weeks. If none of those is your problem, you do not have an app problem.
Verdict by reader
- iPhone, no equipment, and you keep quitting after a few weeks: try Pushup RPG. Free to download, iOS 17.0 or later, camera-counted full-range reps, nothing leaving the device, and a campaign built to survive the boring middle. An optional Vigil membership exists as an in-app purchase; the camera rep-counting and the campaign are free. Rated 4.8 on the App Store (checked July 2026).
- You are on Android: Pushup RPG is available on Google Play. Every competitor named on this page was read off the US App Store, so search your own store rather than trusting this list.
- You own an Apple Watch and want the phone out of it entirely: pick anyone but us. We have no watchOS app and none exists, so if counting from the wrist is the thing that would actually get you training, we are the wrong install and no update is coming that changes it. From the verified list, Puuush, CounterUps and Rep Up for Watch all ship watch counting (checked July 2026).
- Your training space is genuinely tiny: PushCount puts the phone flat under your chest and pushr tracks your face on the TrueDepth camera, so neither listing asks for the run-up that across-the-room camera counting needs.
- You want zero cost and no in-app purchases: Count Pushups with Camera listed as free with no in-app purchases shown (checked July 2026). Prices in this category drift, so check the listing before you commit.
- You cannot do a full pushup yet: no counter is the answer. Start with the where-to-start progression, then add an app once floor reps are happening.
For the full breakdown of how each counting method works — camera, sensor, tap and watch — see our comparison of apps that count pushups.
