Why hydration comes up during a fast
A surprising share of daily fluid arrives with food rather than in a glass. Take meals out of the morning and that fluid goes with them, which is why people who start 16:8 often notice they are drinking less without having decided to. Nothing dramatic follows from that, but it is the reason a water tracker sits next to a fasting timer instead of in a separate app.
The other reason is simpler. Drinking water is one of the few things you can do during a fasting window, so it becomes the thing people reach for when the hour feels long.
How much water during a fast
There is no number here that would be honest. How much fluid a person needs depends on body size, climate, activity, medication, and health conditions, and it is a question for a healthcare professional rather than an app. Anyone quoting you a single figure for everybody is guessing.
What is useful is a goal you set yourself and can actually hit. That is why Pause asks you to choose your own daily target rather than shipping one. A goal you picked, at a level you already roughly meet, is a goal you will keep long enough for the record to mean something. A goal the app invented is one you ignore by Thursday.
If you are unsure where to set it, start from what you already drink on an ordinary day rather than from an aspiration, and adjust once you have a week of real entries to look at.
What to log
Pause tracks water. Whether you also count tea, coffee, or anything else towards your own target is your call, and the app does not police it. What matters for the record being useful is that you are consistent about it: if you count tea one week and not the next, the numbers stop comparing to each other.
Definitions vary across fasting methods. If your chosen method excludes calories during the fasting period, account for what is in a drink as well as its volume. Pause tracks the timer and water separately and does not infer one from the other.
Setting a goal in Pause
The water tracker is deliberately shallow. You set a daily goal, log an entry in a tap, and see how the day is going against it. Entries can be edited or removed afterwards, because people log the wrong amount, log twice, or remember at nine in the evening that they forgot the afternoon. A tracker that will not let you fix a mistake quietly trains you to stop using it.
Like everything else in Pause, entries save on the device first and sync in the background when a connection is available, so logging works on a plane or in a basement gym.
Apple Health, if you want it
Pause can write your entries to Apple Health as dietary water, which puts them next to your sleep, your steps, and whatever else you already track. That permission is requested separately from body mass and active energy, and only when it is relevant, so allowing water does not quietly allow anything else. You can change your mind in Settings at any point, and nothing Apple Health shares leaves your iPhone.
What a water tracker is actually good for
Not accuracy. Nobody logs every glass, and a week of entries is an estimate however carefully you keep it. What it is good for is noticing. Most people who start logging discover their intake is lopsided rather than low: fine on working days, forgotten at weekends, or concentrated into the evening. That pattern is visible after a week and invisible without a record, and it is the kind of thing you can act on without changing anything else about your day.