MyFitnessPal Barcode Scanner Goes Premium and What to Use Now
medium.com
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MFP used to be a freemium model, wherein actual value-add was the pay stuff, and the core functionality/community provided stuff was the gateway towards that.
Unfortunately, the app got too successful, and was sold to a venture capital firm: Francisco Partners for $350m. Now they're going to do what VCs do, and try to liquidate out a profit by any means necessary, even if it ultimately ruins the app on the way out.
Open source code is a successful idea; what hasn't really taken off for various reasons is the concept of open source or community owned databases. The closest thing I know of is OpenStreetMaps. A food/nutrition database would be a fantastic open dataset that would largely stand the test of time (while specific products come and go, base facts about specific foods rarely do).
WikiPedia, and the many wikis around the Internet come to mind.
Another commenter mentioned Wikipedia which is a great model. Importantly, they have both i) automated data-dumps which can be downloaded at any time. ii) an open source platform, which is kind of outside of the scope of the point of just open-source data.
One could imagine a "WikiCalories" site which has all the info that MyFitnessPal did.
And it shows. Values for tons of entries seem to be random guesses, with a bias towards lowball, guilt-assuaging numbers. I use MFP regularly, but I need to pad whatever it says by 20-30% unless I'm eating factory-packaged food or measured homemade food.
> would largely stand the test of time (while specific products come and go, base facts about specific foods rarely do)
Really? Not only do prepared products change their formulations plenty often (as you note), but do you really think the heirloom broccolis of 1950 have the same nutritional profile of the industrial-agriculture broccoli of 2020?
Whether you support industrial agriculture or fear it, it directly drives change to the structural and chemical properties of the things it grows. Macronutrients and especially micronutrients are going to be effected by that.
Public nutrient data seems like a really valuable social good, but community-sourced data for this kind of thing is just going to create a noisy, sloppy data set (as it has on MFP).
That being said, when it feels like a company is getting greedy— it’s best have your pocketbook do the talking/walking.
[1]: https://foodnoms.com
Been using FatSecret[0] myself on and off for the past few years. Name is terrible, and over time it's slowly been becoming more of a featurespam bilkfest, but for the time being it's still perfectly usable without handing over a subscription fee or whatever.
[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fatsecret....
The app is truly a labor of love and it means a lot when I hear others are getting value out of it. If you or anyone has any feedback regarding the app, I'd greatly appreciate it.
The fact that you lurk HN is also awesome. Cheers
I considered paying for the gold for cronometer, but 9.50 a month was a little expensive for me, in the same ballpark as something like Spotify or Netflix.
Erm, no thanks. This is a privacy nightmare!
It really is an excellent app.
Really good job on the app, congrats!
I had a couple slightly off figures from the nutritional label OCR but otherwise this is top notch!
OpenFoodFacts supports barcodes, but it hasn't been implemented here yet, but this still works for my needs.
[0]: https://github.com/SecUSo/privacy-friendly-food-tracker
[1]: https://github.com/SecUSo/privacy-friendly-food-tracker/pull...
Uses the open food facts dB and can use the USDA food database api as well
It should also be usable from a mobile phone. The main point of this app is that you define your favorite ingredients / foods / meal and then use them to log (and even build) your day meals. For example, you add some ingredients like
* plums, per 100 gr have these macros
* milk, per 100 ml, has these macros
* whey protein, per 1 scoop, has these macros
* oat, per 100 gr has these macros
(macros will be cal/prot/carbs/fats/sat fats/sugars/salt/fibers)
Then you add the foods, each food has a number and specific amount of ingredients, for example:
Protein breakfast with oat and plums:
* oat, 40 gr
* milk, 200 ml
* whey protein, 1.5 scoops
* plums, 20 gr
Or
Glass of milk:
* Milk, 300 ml (only 1 ingredient)
And then you can use these foods to calculate your caloric intake per day, for example, on that day I ate:
* 1 glass of milk
* 1 Protein breakfast with oat and plums:
etc
This app is probably better for people that are eating the same things every day; you'll need a little effort to record your favorite stuff but then you should be able to quickly fill your intake logs.
If anybody decides to actually use it (it's completely free) and have any problems / suggestions you can send any comments to
serafeim at spapas dot net
It has a premium version to track more than just calories but barcode scanning is part of the free version
The free version has all the actual valuable stuff, minimal advertising, and the app, on android at least, is perfectly willing to leave you alone and not notify you with spam or advertising or anything. It's been around since literally the original app store release and is still pretty good.
That said - you can get to that information through the free app as well. Just tap on the Dashboard and tap on the Macronutrients graph, and you can get through to daily & weekly breakdowns.
I've often tried upgrading to Premium, but for some reason a Play Store bug keeps preventing my subscription from completing (and somehow they haven't noticed, for months?) I don't need cloud sync anyway. I wish they just had a paid app with a local database, and a CSV export feature so my data isn't locked up. Like when we used to track this stuff using diet tracking apps on Palm Pilots....
I switched to YAZIO a long time ago because I was so frustrated with MFP.
Recently though they introduced an extremely dark pattern of overlaying the “back” navigation with a link to load a full page ad (on iOS, unsure about Android). So, now they lose out on whatever cents they were getting for the crappy ads as I shift use elsewhere. Surprised it passes muster with their ad exchange.
I think we'd all agree health data should be private, and it costs money to run a company. I don't know enough about MyFitnessPal to know if they're double dipping and selling both (seems they're owned by PE, which isn't great), but either way, if we want companies to avoid selling data then we need to be okay with paying for them.
For anyone who doesn't want to follow a link, MacroFactor's killer feature is you input your daily weight and your food and it creates a smoothed estimate of your non-water gain and loss in order to be able to give you a pretty accurate estimate of total daily energy expenditure after a few weeks. That way, you not only track what you're eating, but you know exactly how much you should be eating as well, in a way that is the only way short of checking into a metabolic ward to know your own body's true energy usage. Any other system out there is just guessing based on sample averages from past studies of other people.
This is a promotional piece for Redi.Health, which is somewhat understandable because the author says he is a Senior Software Engineer there.
This isn't an analysis of MyFitnessPal, how it's evolved, or why they chose to move the Barcode Scanner inside the subscription paywall.
If you want to factor that into your understanding of the situation, consider that UnderArmor bought MyFitnessPal in 2015 as part of its foray into digital fitness communities, and sold it to a private equity firm in 2020, https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/30/under-armour-to-sell-myfit....
Horribly generic name, but the app is great and barcode scanning is free.