My Apple Health export.xml is too large to open — how to read it
The reason your Apple Health export will not open is not that it is broken — it is that almost everything tries to load the whole thing into memory at once, and there is too much of it.
Open your file
Drop your file here
export.zip straight from the Health app — do not unzip it
No account. No upload. The file is read on this device and never leaves it.
Nothing has been sent anywhere. 0 requests to this site, for the page's own code.
Why it is so big
The bulk of export.xml is heart rate. The Watch samples it densely — every few seconds during workouts — and stores every reading, so a few years of use is millions of records and a file that runs to hundreds of megabytes. Sleep, steps and everything else add to it, but heart rate is why a text editor, a spreadsheet or a phone-based importer runs out of memory trying to open it: they read the file into RAM before doing anything, and the file is larger than the RAM they are given.
The fix is to stream, not to load
A large XML file does not have to be held in memory to be read — it can be processed as a stream, a piece at a time, with only a small window ever resident. That is how a hundreds-of-megabyte export becomes readable on an ordinary laptop or phone: the tool never materialises the whole document. Do not unzip it first, either; the reader can go straight into the .zip.
Read your export here
This page streams your export on your device — drop the .zip straight from the Health app, no unzip — and summarises what it contains without ever loading it whole, so a file that crashes other tools opens here. Nothing is uploaded.
For what else an export contains, see the Apple Health data dictionary, or read your export in full.