Comparing Nutrition Tracking Apps (iOS)

I’ve decided I’m going to track nutrition again.  I tested entering the same day into 4 apps and recorded myself:

• Up! (came with my fitness tracker)
• MyFitnessPal
• FatSecret
• Lose It!

Here’s the raw video of all 4 side by side.   Its provided for reference only, I don’t expect you to actually watch it, unless you work for one of the above companies trying to understand what I saw.

Here’s a close up of just the breakfast bits, for only two apps, trying to compare the same item to the same item:

Frustrations

These are all my opinions, not statements of fact. 

• Up!
• Could not find some restaurant food, so I had to go find something else that might or might not be equivalent.
• Amazingly wrong values for Orange Juice (45 cal per orange!), and Orange Juice (100 cal per g)
• While the “just add it and edit the quantity later” seems like a good idea at first, I think there were a lot more touches in the end.
• One reason why this one had a longer video – I had to go look up caloric values for stuff it couldn’t find, so that I could go back into the app and update things to more reasonable values.  The other apps, I already knew the caloric value I was looking for, so they were spared this embarrassment.
• Their “slider” for changing quantity took a bunch of fiddling.
• If you enter food as you eat it, it’s a lot easier, but otherwise, selecting times for meals gets hard.  I like the other apps “Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snack” method better. 
• MyFitnessPal
• Looked kinda clunky?  (but it worked!)
• FatSecret
• I think I was trying to put in 471g of soup, since my scale tells me its 471g, and wow that was annoying to have to scroll gently from 100 to 471.
• Lose It!
• Their selection of foods seemed limited, didn’t find what I was looking for.  Its like they’ve tried to reduce complexity of what is available or something?
• App crashed during data entry, I had to restart it.

Winner

MyFitnessPal gets my “business”.  I do not remember being frustrated trying to enter anything; everything I searched for came up; they had decimal input; and I agreed with the calorie estimates given the first time around.

Author: sunnywiz

Me. View all posts by sunnywiz