What 4,313 GLP-1 app reviews actually say people need

16 September 2026 · GLP-1 Tracker

We harvested 4,313 App Store reviews across 27 GLP-1 tracking apps from the US and UK storefronts, then read the complaints and the praise separately. This is what the people using these apps say, in their own words, rather than what app makers think they want.

A note on method, because it changes the numbers. One app in the set is a 2010 WeightWatchers-style tracker with 89,971 ratings that bolted GLP-1 features on later. Its reviews are overwhelmingly about billing disputes that have nothing to do with GLP-1 tracking, and leaving it in skews every theme. The headline figures below are the 3,656 reviews of GLP-1-native trackers, with that one held out.

Price is a third of every complaint

Of 662 reviews at three stars or below, 32.9% are about price or the paywall. Not "it is expensive" — that would be ordinary. The pattern is people who could not evaluate the app before being asked to pay for it:

"You immediately have to pay $70. There is no option to try it for free. Why am I paying $70 if I don't even know if it works for me yet?"

"Downloaded because there's supposed to be free functionality, but the app would not let me do ANYTHING unless I subscribed."

"I was hoping there was a limited functionality free version to try… you literally can't track ANYTHING without the membership, not even weight."

And from the highest-rated app in the category, repeatedly, a narrower version of the same complaint — that the feature people came for is the one behind the wall:

"The free version doesn't contain the most useful thing about the app, which is the estimated medication levels."

The second most praised thing is simplicity

Across 2,994 reviews at four stars or above, weight and progress tracking is praised most (37.1%) and simplicity is second at 32.7%. That is a remarkable number for something no app markets itself on.

It is also the thing the category keeps destroying. A recurring shape in the two-star reviews is a long-time user describing an app they loved before an update reorganised it. If you are choosing a tracker, an app that has resisted the urge to redesign is worth more than one with a longer feature list.

Four things people ask for, in order

414 reviews contain an explicit feature request. Counted:

Water is the clear leader, and the reviews explain why: people treat water, protein and fibre as one thing. The happiest reviewers of one competitor repeat almost the same sentence — "helps me track water, protein and fiber". Dehydration is also a real and common concern on these medications, which is a conversation for your prescriber rather than an app.

The angriest reviews in the entire set are about lost data

Data loss is only 4.2% of complaints by volume, but it produces the most furious writing in the corpus, and it happened to the category leader:

"Updated the app this evening and have lost all my previous jab records and weight loss progress. Absolutely gutted."

"Thanks for the update it's wiped out my history for last 18 months 🤬🤬"

"Love the app but when I got a new phone there's no way to transfer all your data. The app just keeps making you start over. So I canceled my subscription."

If you are picking a tracker, this is the question worth asking before you commit a year of your history to it: can I get my data out? An app that cannot export is an app you can only leave by starting over.

There is an AI backlash

5.4% of complaints mention AI features, and essentially all of them are negative — inaccurate food recognition, chatbots that replace things that used to be buttons, and in one case an AI suggestion a reviewer described as unsafe. In a category built on numbers people are putting into their own medical record, "the computer guessed" is not a feature.

"The AI identification of food gives you its best guess. No meal planning component and the GLP-1 tracking is a prediction of average daily reminder of medicine. No science behind it."

Food tracking is where these apps are weakest

Food is 16.5% of complaints, second only to price, and the failure comes in two shapes. Some apps have no food tracking at all:

"This app doesn't do anything I can't already do with MyFitnessPal. No food tracking, minimal features, and not worth the subscription price."

Others have it, and the data is wrong:

"My can of tuna has 20g of protein and it came up 16g."

"I'm finding very few of my food items in the search, and when I scan them, it almost always comes up with incorrect [data]."

This matters more on a GLP-1 than it would otherwise. Appetite drops sharply, total intake falls with it, and protein is the number most people are told to protect. A protein figure that is 20% wrong is not a rounding error when you are eating 900 calories a day.

What we took from this

We build GLP-1 Tracker, so treat this section as interested rather than neutral. The research changed what we built: water tracking, export and restore, and Apple Health all shipped because of these numbers, not because we thought of them. Logging stays free — all of it, with no account — because a third of the complaints in this category are from people who were never allowed to try the thing before paying for it.

The raw data and the scripts that produced it live in our repository. We would rather the numbers were checkable than impressive.