MyFitnessPal: Calorie Counter reviews

The one real moat is the huge, user-built food database. People who hate everything else say outright they stay only for it: type grams off a kitchen scale and get accurate macros in a second. That turns a one-off tracker into a daily ritual nobody wants to abandon.

Saved recipes, custom foods and a years-long log become a personal asset you can't carry to a rival. That keeps people through redesign rage — leaving means losing 'years of recipes.' But the lock is brittle: when an update wipes workouts or history, the exact thing holding people vanishes, and the exit is instant and bitter.

The strongest emotional hook isn't accuracy, it's the feeling of being accountable to yourself. People recount multi-year stories of losing 20, 80, 150+ lbs and say it 'holds me accountable' and won't let them gaslight themselves. Logging becomes a near-automatic ritual. That explains the abnormal loyalty: the product sells discipline, and the numbers are just its instrument.

The whole food diary used to read on one screen; now each meal is hidden behind its own tap and you can't see the day as a whole. For a calorie diary that's fatal — the product exists for the quick 'how much is left' glance, and the redesign buried it under taps and scrolls. Users with 10-15 year histories leave over exactly this, not over price.

Swiping left-right between days was wired into the habit: open, swipe to yesterday, check. The redesign replaced it with a date picker at the top, so people get stuck on the wrong day, log food into it, then delete. A tiny gesture, but it was the heart of the daily ritual — without it every session became friction.

You used to delete a whole meal or copy an entire day in one action. Now it's one item at a time. This compounds a second flaw: the UI makes it easy to accidentally copy yesterday's food onto today, and you can only clean it up line by line. The product creates the mistake and then removes the fast way to undo it.

The core value of a calorie diary is the instant answer to 'how many calories can I still eat.' The update swapped the counting-down remainder for a counting-up total, so users lose the main cue for 'eat or not.' This isn't cosmetic, it's a mental-model swap: the product stopped answering the single question people open it for before every meal.

Streak gamification is meant to pull people back into the habit, but the new 'quirky' notification tone ('not logging? you'll make us sad') reads as manipulative and infantilizing. For an audience that already logs automatically the streak is useless, and you can't turn it off. A retention mechanism became an irritant people explicitly cite as making them want to uninstall.

Pairing with Fitbit, Garmin, Samsung and Health Connect is sold as the edge — burned calories sync automatically. In practice steps are off by multiples, workouts either never arrive or duplicate five times and wreck the calorie remainder, and you can't enter steps manually. Half the 'eaten minus burned' equation is unreliable, so the product falls short of the one-stop health hub it pitches.

The very thing that makes the database huge — open user entry — also clogs it. A single food surfaces a dozen entries with different calories and you have to guess which is right; even 'verified' ones can be wrong. Logging quality hinges on whether the user picked the correct row, which quietly erodes trust in the number the whole thing exists to provide.

The diary only shows fixed nutrient sets, and you can't see, say, protein and fiber at once — you must pick one. For users with a specific goal (diabetes, keto, fiber) this defeats the point: they pay yet can't assemble on one screen the exact metrics they came for. Customization — the thing that would turn a tracker into a personal tool — is locked away.

Photo food recognition is the flagship new feature, but it can't tell a 60-calorie small yogurt from a 250-calorie full cup. And since you end up typing the quantity by hand anyway, it removes none of the logging friction it was pitched to kill. It becomes a demo feature: impressive at install, useless in the real daily loop, and people fall back to manual entry.

Recipes in 'cups,' a week that starts on Sunday, salt only as 'sodium' — small things that, for a non-American, turn every entry into a conversion. You can't align the week to your weigh-in day, can't track salt by the European standard. Individually trivial, together a constant friction tax that leaves international users feeling second-class.

To use the app at all you must consent to transferring your data to the US — and a segment of users balks right here, especially given how sensitive health data is. This isn't a buried policy line, it's a blocking screen at the very start: the product loses cautious users before it ever proves value, and declining means you can't get in at all.

This is the single money card — and it's about a mechanism, not a price gripe. The app walks you through 20 minutes of goal and meal-plan setup, then reveals the subscription only at the very end. The user invests time, feels the sunk-cost pull — and hits the wall right there. Activation arrives after trust is already spent, so the refusal reads as bait-and-switch and people score it zero before a single real use.