Apple / health_and_fitness / MYFITNESSPAL: CALORIE COUNTER
REVIEW
MyFitnessPal on iPhone is a fast tracker stapled to a slow business decision.
The 2024 iOS rebuild made logging genuinely quick, and Apple Health sync is finally bidirectional — but the barcode paywall and the iPad app are still the parts the company won't fix.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
MyFitnessPal: Calorie Counter
MYFITNESSPAL, INC.
OUR SCORE
6.8
APPLE
★ 4.7
PRICE
Free
MyFitnessPal has been on iPhone since 2009 — older than the App Store category it sits in, older than HealthKit, older than the version of the company that ships it now. For most of that history, the iOS app was a thin wrapper over a web product, carrying the world’s largest crowd-sourced food database on the shoulders of a UIKit codebase that aged in public. The 2024 rebuild is the first time the iPhone app has actually felt like a 2020s iOS app.
The rebuild matters because the rest of the story doesn’t move. Barcode scanning is still behind the Premium paywall — the October 2022 decision that defined a generation of one-star reviews, “best MyFitnessPal alternatives” articles, and sustained switcher traffic to MacroFactor and Cronometer. Apple Health two-way sync is finally honest, Siri Shortcuts cover the daily actions, and the watchOS app exists. The iPad app does not, in any meaningful sense.
What’s left is a faster, more native, more Health-integrated version of a product whose biggest problem was never the engineering. The rebuild fixed everything the engineers could fix. The paywall is the part only an executive can.
The rebuild fixed everything the engineers could fix. The paywall is the part only an executive can.
FEATURES
MyFitnessPal's iOS app was rewritten in 2024 — a top-to-bottom rebuild that finally retired the years of UIKit sediment underneath the Diary. The result is the version of the app the company should have shipped when Apple Health launched. Search-as-you-type for foods is meaningfully faster, the Diary scrolls without the half-beat hitch the old build had on older iPhones, and the meal-by-meal layout uses the iOS swipe-action vocabulary the way a native app is supposed to.
Apple Health integration is the part that actually moved. The app now writes dietary energy, protein, carbohydrates, fat, water, and caffeine to Health in real time as you log, and reads exercise calories, weight, body fat percentage, and steps back from any source HealthKit is authoritative for — Apple Watch workouts, third-party rings, scales, anything else. The pairing flow lives in Settings → Apps & Devices and is one of the cleaner HealthKit setups in the category.
The iOS-only surface is broader than it used to be. Siri Shortcuts cover log-food, log-water, and view-today actions, all addressable from the Shortcuts app or via "Hey Siri, log a glass of water in MyFitnessPal." A Lock Screen widget shows remaining calories and macro progress. Live Activities surface workout-in-progress state when you start one from a paired Apple Watch. The watchOS companion app does standalone logging from recents and frequents, with complications for the modular and Infograph faces.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The rebuild fixed the things engineers could fix. Cold-start time on an iPhone 13 is roughly half what it was on the old build, the food-search latency feels native instead of webby, and the Diary's macro ring uses SF Symbols and system materials the way iOS 18 expects. Logging a familiar breakfast from the Recent list now takes three taps and under two seconds — competitive with Lose It for the first time in years.
Apple Health two-way sync is the integration MyFitnessPal users have asked for since 2014, and it's finally honest. Calories burned from an Apple Watch ring close the loop in the Diary without the old "exercise calories" hand-mapping. Weight written from a Withings or Renpho scale shows up in the trend chart the same day. For anyone already living inside the Apple Health graph, this is the version of MyFitnessPal that finally fits.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Barcode scanning is still Premium-only, three and a half years after the October 2022 paywall move that the app's userbase has not forgiven. The rebuild did not undo it. Free-tier iPhone users still scan, see the result, and then hit a subscription wall before the entry lands in the Diary — which on a phone, in a grocery aisle, is the worst possible UX for the worst possible reason. Meal-photo logging and verified-database filtering sit behind the same paywall.
The iPad app is the other unresolved story. It is still a stretched iPhone layout in 2026 — no multi-column Diary, no proper sidebar, no Stage Manager polish, no Apple Pencil affordances for the food-photo flow. For an app that has been on iPad since the original iPad shipped, this is conspicuous. The free tier on iPhone also runs heavier interstitial ads than it did two years ago, and an Apple Health energy-write that fails silently — which it sometimes does after a long background period — is a real source of double-counting that the rebuild did not solve.
CONCLUSION
Install the iOS app if you live in Apple Health, want the largest food database in the category, and are willing to pay for Premium — or content to log without the barcode scanner. The 2024 rebuild is the best version of MyFitnessPal there has ever been on iPhone, and the HealthKit story is finally one to recommend. If you're starting fresh and the barcode paywall offends you, MacroFactor and Cronometer are both honest iOS apps with no scanner games. The database advantage is real. The pricing decisions around it are the part the rebuild couldn't touch.