Gandalf Saxe
Sep 1, 2018 · 2 min read

I agree with everything you said, except that I do use the plus button; it’s always in the same position and the meal buttons that appear from it are always in the same location. Easier than manually scrolling and finding a target IMO.

In general there are too many taps for simple things, as you point out. As you also point out, it’s also not possible to add/subtract an amount of food on multiple items at once. So if you take a little more of that home made meal you made, you have to go into every single ingredient and add a little manually. Same if you don’t eat it all or start to share some of it with someone. It’s maddening.

Another issue I’m frustrated by the fact that Lifesum doesn’t show me HOW I obtained a particular macro nutrient distribution of a particular meal. Oops, 40% of what I ate was fat, but how did I get there? A simple ordered list, barchart, piechart or ANYHTING would be good. Instead I’m left to go through the various food items I ate and figure out where I went wrong or a little overboard with some ingredient.

Also you can’t track salt in their app, only sodium. In the US they indicate sodium content, and in Europe, salt. They’re not equivalent, and the users can’t know, so I’ve seen a lot of food items having their salt content in mg added as sodium content in mg. Lifesum is a Swedish company and they don’t support EU standards of salt declaration in food. Really strange.

Their Apple Watch app is also yet another expression on how Lifesum unfortunately unfortunately tends to go for the cute option over functionality. You have a little avatar that will indicate if he is hungry, sleepy, thirsty, need to walk around etc. Perhaps a cute idea, but completely and utterly useless in practice; I’m willing to bet that almost nobody uses it. You can’t even add water which would be the obvious use of an Apple Watch app. And there are no watch face complications.

It’s not all bad of course. In general their design is very pleasing and some of the screens show good information (such as the top of the diary screen). I’ve just been using it for two weeks, and I noticed there are so many low hanging fruit for this app. It’s actually hard to believe they’ve been in business since 2012, but still have so many fundamental problems. I know it’s hard to make a good app, but that doesn’t excuse so many low hanging fruit 6 years after launch. I’ll try out MyFitnessPal at some point, which I’m sure has it’s own problems. What attracted me to Lifesum was the design, and I’m still going to be a premium user for while, but I do want to see some development of the app in the next year. I’m a little vary they don’t have a blog on development / new features, but only about food and nutrition, but let’s hope for the best.

    Gandalf Saxe

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