Honest app reviews
Unbiased, in-depth reviews of nutrition and fitness apps. We score each app on a ten-point scale, surface the pain points real users hit in App Store reviews, and explain who the app is right for.
Cal AI
Cal AI built a viral photo-based calorie tracker on the back of a 150-influencer marketing engine and is now defined by a 3.2 million record data breach and an Apple App Store removal for deceptive billing. The product underneath the marketing is a thin RAG layer over scraped food databases that systematically underestimates mixed dishes and locks meaningful use behind a $5.99 weekly to $49.99 annual paywall.
Carb Manager
Carb Manager is the de facto keto tracker, with 8M+ users since 2010 and 4.8 stars across 634K iOS reviews. The keto and diabetes feature depth is real, and so is the database conflict, edit-fails-to-save, and refund friction that surfaces in current reviews.
Cronometer
Cronometer pulls from USDA FoodData Central and the University of Minnesota NCCDB to deliver 82 to 84 nutrients per food, the deepest verified micronutrient dataset in the App Store, with a 2025 peer-reviewed validation study confirming close agreement on most nutrients.
FatSecret Calorie Counter
FatSecret keeps a generous free tier but pushes its newest features behind Premium, including Smart Food Scan, the Smart Assistant, dietitian meal plans, custom meal headings, and the water tracker. The free experience remains ad-supported, the database stays shallow on micronutrients, and the app still freezes mid-entry for a non-trivial share of users.
Lifesum
Lifesum is a beautifully designed Stockholm calorie tracker with 65 million users that took its 2025 multimodal AI pivot from differentiator to reliability problem, with App Store reviews now flagging misidentified foods, doubled barcode scans, and forced logouts as the most consistent post-update complaints.
Lose It!
Lose It! is a friendly, gamified calorie tracker, but the 2026 paywall shift moved Snap It photo logging, Scan It barcode scanning, and macro targets behind Premium for new accounts, and the free tier is now thin enough to feel like a trial.
MacroFactor
MacroFactor's adaptive expenditure algorithm converges on your true TDEE within two to three weeks of consistent logging, backed by the Stronger By Science and MASS research review team. The result is the most rigorous coaching engine in the category, paired with three program modes and a price that has not moved in six years.
MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal now sells two paid tiers, Premium at $79.99 per year and Premium+ at $99.99 per year, while leaning on its 20-million-entry crowd database and the December 2025 acquisition of Cal AI to catch up on AI logging. The trade-offs around paywalled barcode scanning, intrusive ads, a pending privacy class action, and a 2025 peer-reviewed reliability rating of low have stacked up against the daily user experience.
MyNetDiary
MyNetDiary pairs a 100% staff-verified database of about 2 million foods with a separate Diabetes Tracker companion app and a Premium Plus tier that adds AI Coach, AI Meal Scan, AI Voice Logging, and AI Restaurant Menu Scan. The reliability tension shows up in a recurring time zone bleed where early-morning logs land on the previous day, exercise sync gaps, unexpected renewal charges, and a website UI that still feels years behind the mobile app.
Noom
Noom is a behavioral weight loss app whose cancellation flow was so adversarial that a New York federal court approved a $62 million class action settlement in Mahood v. Noom, with $56 million in cash and $6 million in subscription credits, after a former senior engineer testified the design was difficult by design. The product has since pivoted toward GLP-1 prescriptions through Noom Med while a 2024 AI assistant called Welli absorbs the routine inquiries that used to go to the human coaches Noom laid off in 2022.
YAZIO
YAZIO leads the category on intermittent fasting and European food coverage. The data integrity underneath the polish is uneven.
