App Review
FatSecret Calorie Counter Review
Fuel Nutrition Team • March 1, 2026
Fuel Nutrition Team • March 1, 2026
| Pain point | What shows up in iOS reviews |
|---|---|
| "Recent foods" is context-locked and effectively unusable | Foods logged under one meal type are hard to find under a different meal — recents are tied to context rather than globally searchable. |
| No search within recent foods | Reviewers call out the absence of a search function inside recents explicitly; the only option is scrolling through an undifferentiated list. |
| Barcode-not-found flow requires backing all the way out | When a scan fails, users must exit the scanner and navigate manually to add a new item — a broken workflow for a routine event. |
| Nutrition database has frequent inaccuracies | Reviews cite a high rate of incorrect macro data even from barcode scans, with correction requests going unacknowledged by support. |
| Recipe flow is unnecessarily restrictive | Creating recipes forces sharing settings and metadata inputs; editing nutrition data inside the cookbook view isn't possible. |
| Support appears indifferent to correction requests | A recurring theme is submitting multiple error tickets with no response, leaving incorrect database entries in place indefinitely. |
FatSecret Calorie Counter was a reasonable choice when "free calorie tracker" was a meaningful differentiator on its own. In 2026, the "simple" approach that once felt refreshing reads as an app that stopped evolving. The bar for a daily nutrition tool has risen considerably — faster reuse of foods you log regularly, barcode flows that handle failures gracefully, databases with a baseline of accuracy — and FatSecret's current experience works against all three. Recent foods are context-locked and can't be searched. Barcode failures require backing all the way out. Database inaccuracies get reported and ignored. The result is an app that demands more manual work than most alternatives while offering less overall value.
Fuel eliminates the "find it, scan it, correct it, trust it" cycle entirely. There's no barcode lookup, no recents list to scroll through, no crowd-sourced database to cross-reference. You photograph the health label directly, or describe the meal in text or voice, and correct with natural language until the entry matches what you actually ate. Professionally designed recipes in the library don't require sharing settings or metadata forms — they're yours, portionable from ½x to 2x, with macro targets baked in. Your data stays on-device by default, never dependent on a support ticket to fix an inaccurate entry someone else submitted years ago.
FatSecret's simplicity has curdled into friction: reuse is difficult, barcodes are unreliable, and the database is inaccurate with no meaningful correction path. If you want fast, accurate logging without a database dependency or a support-ticket workflow, Fuel's photo-first AI logging is the structural replacement.
Once the undisputed default in calorie tracking — buoyed by the largest food database in the category and years of "everyone uses it" momentum — MyFitnessPal has spent the better part of the last five years quietly becoming a product that serves its business model more reliably than it serves its users
If you can tune out the relentless Premium push — discount timers, persistent banners, nudges baked into every surface — Lose It! is genuinely one of the more pleasant calorie-logging experiences available