MyFitnessPal has been the default calorie tracking app for over a decade. It has the largest food database in the world. And yet its reviews tell a story of a user base that feels increasingly abandoned.
We analysed thousands of App Store and Google Play reviews to understand what's really going on — and what users are desperately searching for instead.
What MyFitnessPal Users Still Love
The food database is genuinely unmatched. Users who've tried alternatives consistently come back to MyFitnessPal because nothing else has the same breadth of entries, including restaurant menus, branded products, and user-submitted foods. After 10+ years of crowdsourced data, this moat is real.
Barcode scanning is praised universally. The speed and accuracy of scanning packaged food is something users take for granted until they try an app that does it worse.
The social and community features — friend connections, leaderboards, sharing achievements — drive retention among users who are motivated by accountability. This is a meaningful differentiator that competitors haven't matched at scale.
The Complaints — And Why They're Getting Louder
The paywall migration is the central trauma of the MyFitnessPal user base. In 2022, MyFitnessPal moved several previously free features — including net calorie goals and macro tracking — behind the Premium subscription. Users who had been using the app for years suddenly found their workflow broken.
The reviews from this period are brutal. Phrases like "held hostage," "greed," and "lost a loyal user" appear repeatedly. Many users explicitly describe switching to competitors specifically because of this.
Premium pricing doesn't feel justified. At €19.99/month or €79.99/year, MyFitnessPal Premium is expensive relative to competitors. Users who pay consistently report that the Premium features don't feel worth the cost — the app doesn't fundamentally change, it just removes friction.
The app feels dated. The UI hasn't substantially changed in years. Competitors like Cronometer and Lose It have caught up on database quality and present a significantly more modern experience. Long-term users describe a growing embarrassment showing the app to friends.
Data inaccuracies in the food database. With millions of user-submitted entries, quality control is inconsistent. Users report scanning barcodes and finding wildly incorrect calorie counts, then needing to manually verify entries. For a calorie-counting app, this is a fundamental trust issue.
Aggressive push notifications and upsells frustrate free-tier users. The app frequently promotes Premium in ways users describe as harassing rather than persuasive.
Why Users Are Leaving
The pattern in negative reviews isn't just about individual features. It's about a perceived relationship breakdown. Users who'd been with the app for 5-8 years describe feeling like the app stopped caring about them and started treating them as a revenue line item.
This is a meaningful signal. Churn from apps with deep feature moats rarely happens because of a single bad decision — it happens when the accumulated small decisions erode trust past a breaking point. MyFitnessPal has been making those small decisions for several years.
What Users Actually Want
Reading through the feature requests reveals a consistent picture:
Simpler macro tracking without a paywall. The single most common request is the restoration of basic macro tracking to the free tier. Users aren't asking for much — just the functionality they had before 2022.
Better recipe and meal planning tools. Users want to plan their week in advance, not just log retrospectively. This is a gap several newer competitors are exploiting.
Integration with more wearables and health platforms. Apple Health and Fitbit integrations exist but are inconsistent. Users want a hub that actually works across their devices.
An offline mode that functions properly. Logging food without internet access is a basic requirement that MyFitnessPal's implementation regularly fails.
The Market Opportunity
The opportunity in calorie tracking is not to build a better database — that's MyFitnessPal's moat and it would take years to challenge. The opportunity is to build a better relationship with users.
An app that is fully-featured on the free tier, transparent about its business model (perhaps a one-time purchase rather than a subscription), and designed with modern UX principles could capture a significant portion of MyFitnessPal's frustrated user base. They're not loyal to the app anymore — they're just staying because switching is painful.
Reduce the switching cost and the migration begins.
See the complete AI analysis including the full opportunity score: View the MyFitnessPal report →