Google Play / health_and_fitness / MYFITNESSPAL: CALORIE COUNTER
REVIEW
MyFitnessPal still has the biggest food database — and the longest memory of betraying its users.
The category-defining calorie tracker now charges Premium for the feature it built its reputation on. The database is still unmatched. The trust is not.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
MyFitnessPal: Calorie Counter
MYFITNESSPAL, INC.
OUR SCORE
6.8
GOOGLE PLAY
★ 4.4
PRICE
Free
In-app purchases
MyFitnessPal is older than most fitness apps still in active development. It launched in 2005 as a web tool, became one of the early App Store and Play Store hits, sold to Under Armour for $475 million in 2015, and was sold again — this time to the private equity firm Francisco Partners — in 2020 for a reported $345 million. Through all of that, one thing stayed constant: the food database. Users have been adding entries to it for fifteen years. That accumulated work is what made MyFitnessPal the default calorie tracker for a generation of people trying to lose weight, gain muscle, or just understand what they were actually eating.
Then in October 2022, the company moved the barcode scanner — the single feature most users associate with the app — behind the Premium paywall. The reaction was immediate. Play Store and App Store ratings dropped, “best MyFitnessPal alternatives” became a steady search query, and Cronometer and the then-young MacroFactor both reported sustained user growth from defectors. The barcode scanner is now Premium-only and has been for over three years. The product team has made other changes since — meal-photo logging, AI-assisted estimations, improved integrations — but the 2022 decision is the inflection point everything else is judged against.
What’s left is an honest assessment of what MyFitnessPal still does well and what it costs. The database is still the largest. The integrations still work. The Diary is still well-designed for what it does. But the company has signaled clearly which side of the free / paid line it intends to push features across, and the competitors that have emerged since are not making the same bets. The question is no longer whether MyFitnessPal is the best calorie tracker — it’s whether the database advantage justifies the rest.
MyFitnessPal still wins on database size — but it lost the goodwill it spent fifteen years accumulating in a single 2022 product decision.
FEATURES
MyFitnessPal is a calorie and macro tracker built on top of the largest crowd-sourced food database in the category — millions of entries, most contributed by users over fifteen years. You log meals by searching, scanning a barcode, snapping a photo (a newer Premium feature), or recalling from your recent / frequent list. The app tallies calories against a daily goal, splits them into protein / carbs / fat, and rolls up trends over time.
Beyond food logging it tracks weight, exercise (manually or via Fitbit / Garmin / Apple Health / Google Fit / Samsung Health imports), water intake, and steps. The Recipe Builder lets you paste a URL or type ingredients in and get a per-serving breakdown. The Diary view is the daily anchor — meal-by-meal log, macro bar at the top, "Complete this entry" prompt that estimates your weight in five weeks if you keep eating this way.
Pricing is two-tier: a free tier supported by display ads and a Premium subscription (monthly or annual; prices vary by region and promotional cycle). The barcode scanner moved behind the Premium paywall in October 2022. Custom macro goals, ad removal, meal scanning, food-photo logging, and verified-database filtering are all Premium.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The food database is the moat and the moat still holds. Generic restaurant entries, regional grocery items, niche supplements, obscure protein bars — MyFitnessPal has them, often with multiple user-submitted variants you can pick between. Lose It and Cronometer both have respectable databases; neither has fifteen years of crowd-sourced breadth. For anyone who eats outside chain restaurants, this is the difference between logging a meal in thirty seconds and giving up.
Cross-platform sync is solid. The Android, iOS, and web clients stay in lockstep, and the integrations with the major fitness wearables work without manual fiddling once paired. The Diary's daily summary — total in, total out, net — is the right unit of analysis for the people this app actually serves, and the weight-trend chart correctly smooths the daily noise instead of plotting every fluctuation as a referendum on your diet.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
October 2022 is the date this app changed character. Barcode scanning — the single feature that made MyFitnessPal a category-defining app, the reason millions of users picked it over manual-entry competitors — moved behind the Premium paywall. The user revolt was immediate and large: one-star reviews flooded the stores, fitness publications ran "best MyFitnessPal alternatives" pieces for months, and competitors like MacroFactor and Cronometer picked up sustained switcher traffic that hasn't reversed. The decision was Francisco Partners' to make — the private equity firm bought MyFitnessPal from Under Armour in 2020 for a reported $345 million — but the trust cost lands on the product.
Beyond the paywall, the free tier is heavily ad-laden in a way it didn't used to be. Interstitials, banner ads in the Diary, and upsell prompts have multiplied. Logging speed on a budget Android phone is meaningfully worse than Lose It's, partly because of the ads and partly because the app has accumulated fifteen years of UI sediment. The verified-database filter (which separates user-submitted entries from MyFitnessPal-curated ones) is itself Premium, which means free-tier users searching for "chicken breast" wade through a dozen contradictory entries with different per-100g values.
CONCLUSION
Install MyFitnessPal if the database breadth genuinely matters for what you eat and you're willing to pay Premium — or if you've been using it for years and your historical data is locked in. For anyone starting fresh in 2026, look at MacroFactor (better coaching algorithm, paid-only but no paywall games), Cronometer (better for micronutrients, free barcode scanning), or Lose It (closest free-tier feature parity to old MyFitnessPal). The database is still the best in the category. Whether that's worth the company's track record is a question the 2022 cohort already answered with their downloads.