The App Store Is Drowning in Calorie Trackers
If you're new to this or the title sounds exaggerated to you; I'd like to invite you to open the App Store and search “calorie tracker.”
You'd find the same app. Over. And over. And over. We have now hundreds of calorie apps.
Just a different icon, slightly different colors but the same exact app uninspired clone at the core.
Don't get me wrong calorie tracking itself isn’t the enemy but rather the flood the App Store and Social Media are drowning in.
Let me ask you:
Are relationships with food better?
Are users less confused?
Are people healthier?
And this take is coming from a person who's been struggling with weight my whole life.
I want to be completely and utterly honest: I have myself created a Calorie Tracking application; Kalo. It’s easy to build another tracker but it’s much harder to rethink what we measure and how we interpret it. And I am not claiming to have solved it but I am trying to shape it in a way that helps me and the people in need the most.
I strongly believe Kalo could continuously evolve in the direction to truly make people healthier by continuously improving the user experience and giving more and more data and instructions on how to interpret it.
But I need your help on this. The industry doesn't need more calorie trackers, it needs better thinking and better solutions.
Let me know what you think. And I promise to improve Kalo to my best efforts.
Replies
Hi Francesco,
It sounds like maybe you're having some doubts about the necessity of what you've created. So let me throw the question back to you: What is different about your calorie tracker?
Hi @jeff_benson1 thank you very much for your comment. You know, the category I’m trying to enter is not easy. If we exclude spam, useless promises, diets, false myths that are far too much present today… creating something that is truly useful in health, I believe, might benefit from a multitude of experiences that I alone am not able to fully capture.
That said; Kalo tries to evolve in a multitude of things:
Greatly improve the AI usefulness. By including data like NOVA processing level, sugar blood spike potential, AI daily summarization
Include and merge ALL the pillars of health that have an enormous impact on weight management: Sleep and Fitness Activity. BEYOND just calories.
Kalo can scan restaurants menus to help you also outside the context of home to help deciding process
Include energy tracking to empower how to manage energy-intensive activities like workouts in the best time of day
And finally overall try to move the UX in the direction of usefulness and personalization. Including weight tracking, personalizing your path based on your pace (more aggressive or more long-term) and being able to fit meals with dietary preferences and allergies.