Review Insights · App Store
Cronometer: Calorie Counter
Cronometer Software Inc · 93,284 ratings · ★ 4.8
4.8
★★★★★
93,284 ratings
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Top complaints - extracted from 25 negative reviews
Recurring phrases mined from 1-2★ reviews. The bigger the percentage, the more users have the same problem. Fix the top 2-3 in your version and you have product-market fit on day one.
1
"food"
8 negative reviews mention this · 32% of all complaints
★★★★★ "New update sucks. The new update made everything show up alphabetically when you search. It’s not intuitive at all anymore and you have to scroll all the way down to find the most basic food. It’s a pain to use now" - Ok.nom
2
"update"
6 negative reviews mention this · 24% of all complaints
★★★★★ "New update sucks. The new update made everything show up alphabetically when you search. It’s not intuitive at all anymore and you have to scroll all the way down to find the most basic food. It’s a pain to use now" - Ok.nom
3
"doesn"
6 negative reviews mention this · 24% of all complaints
★★★★★ "This is so awful it is borderline useless and dangerous if you rely on it.. I end up going to usda and adding custom entries for everything. How can they be this incompetent? Can’t they scrape usda or download database? Examples: most fish no B12, no potassium content (very important medical info for many) for matc…" - Arazonan
4
"search"
4 negative reviews mention this · 16% of all complaints
★★★★★ "New update sucks. The new update made everything show up alphabetically when you search. It’s not intuitive at all anymore and you have to scroll all the way down to find the most basic food. It’s a pain to use now" - Ok.nom
5
"nutrition"
4 negative reviews mention this · 16% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Less options and nutrition information on India vegetarian food. Please review it" - Swamyrp
6
"other"
4 negative reviews mention this · 16% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Search Issues. I love this app and how it integrates with my other wellness applications. The recent update made it impossible to easily search generic items… brands pop up first and then you have to filter through everything to get to a generic item. Ver…" - umamibob
7
"tracker"
4 negative reviews mention this · 16% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Stupid app. Why does every calorie tracker have subscriptions like I can’t just use the app in peace" - Angel_6273crddd
8
"version"
4 negative reviews mention this · 16% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Too much…. Nutrition tracking is okay, but searching for something else. Way too many ads in non-paid version. Have used other ad-supported apps and none come close to the number and intrusiveness as experienced in Cronometer. At least one feature sug…" - JMO, YMMV
9
"issues"
3 negative reviews mention this · 12% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Sudden issues in the last few weeks syncing with devices/apps and updating macros is now a disaster.. I just renewed and now regret" - Jojoaoccam
10
"sucks"
3 negative reviews mention this · 12% of all complaints
★★★★★ "New update sucks. The new update made everything show up alphabetically when you search. It’s not intuitive at all anymore and you have to scroll all the way down to find the most basic food. It’s a pain to use now" - Ok.nom
11
"everything"
3 negative reviews mention this · 12% of all complaints
★★★★★ "New update sucks. The new update made everything show up alphabetically when you search. It’s not intuitive at all anymore and you have to scroll all the way down to find the most basic food. It’s a pain to use now" - Ok.nom
12
"down"
3 negative reviews mention this · 12% of all complaints
★★★★★ "New update sucks. The new update made everything show up alphabetically when you search. It’s not intuitive at all anymore and you have to scroll all the way down to find the most basic food. It’s a pain to use now" - Ok.nom
📋 All 25 negative reviews
Every 1-2★ review we fetched. Use the copy button to grab them all for your own analysis (paste into ChatGPT/Claude with a prompt like "summarize core user problems, group by theme, ignore bugs, focus on missing features").
Sudden issues in the last few weeks syncing with devices/apps and updating macros is now a disaster.
I just renewed and now regret
New update sucks
The new update made everything show up alphabetically when you search. It’s not intuitive at all anymore and you have to scroll all the way down to find the most basic food. It’s a pain to use now
Stupid app
Why does every calorie tracker have subscriptions like I can’t just use the app in peace
Update made food tracking miserable
Used to be quick and easy to log food but whatever update dropped recently completely changed the order of whatever food shows up when I search foods to add. There’s no reason I have to scroll so far down to add “banana” when it shows me 3-5 pages of banana products first. All the items I typed used to be at the top of the list.
Horrible UX experience
Don’t waste your time with this god awful app
This is so awful it is borderline useless and dangerous if you rely on it.
I end up going to usda and adding custom entries for everything. How can they be this incompetent? Can’t they scrape usda or download database? Examples: most fish no B12, no potassium content (very important medical info for many) for matcha, k2 doesn’t exist in their universe so if you take d3 with k2 or natto lol use spreadsheet instead. All this is in usda database. Use a spreadsheet and have ai look up usda entries instead of using this useless app. This app is garbage.
Friend integration
This would be a 5star review if you could see your friends day and food diary. But you cant really see your friends info only can share recipes. I will make it 5 stars if that ever changes!
VPN
App would have absolutely deserved a 5 star review. However I need to turn off my vpn every single time I want to use it, for an app I already pay for, I would rather my damn food tracker NOT harvest data too.
Bad update
Change energy settings back, it’s too nested and confusing
Latest update
After the latest update, I can’t login in on either the mobile or desktop app
App sucks
Hard to use and understand
This app crashes at least a dozen times a day
The free version has ads and it crashes the app. Every time an ad comes up. The company knows about it. And they don’t fix it. It’s by design. They previously responded and said oh you should contact us directly because the app isn’t supposed to do that but you see all these other reviews that say the exact same thing as me and they know that it crashes and that’s by design they want to drive people to buy the app out of of frustration. I will never purchase this app. I’m waiting for Apple’s nutrition app to come out with the next operating system release, which is supposed to happen in the fall.
TrainingPeaks
Would be great if you could sync your nutrition to TrainingPeaks!
Doesn’t work on iMac Tahoe
I downloaded this app to work on my iMac running Tahoe but it doesn’t work. It opens to a window and the logo but never actually does anything
User unfriendly
The app has not been tested properly by developers. When attempting to enter foods it doesn’t allow for custom settings, it says it does, but the actual UI sucks, it creates a ridiculous loop
Not viable on macOS
I have a MacBook Air M2 and, according to Apple, many iPad and iPhone apps will run on it as long as they don’t depend on device specific features. Well, Cronometer doesn’t run on my MB Air (running Tahoe 26.4.1). It opens to a screen showing the apple with an arrow in it logo and stops right there. I wish there was a macOS version - I’m much more comfortable doing data entry on a physical keyboard than a screen.
Less options and nutrition information on India vegetarian food
Please review it
Search Issues
I love this app and how it integrates with my other wellness applications. The recent update made it impossible to easily search generic items… brands pop up first and then you have to filter through everything to get to a generic item. Very frustrating and time consuming. Prior to the update, no issues
Gold to print?
I find it a little ridiculous that we have to PAY to print our food diaries. Or send them to someone. We can’t have friends without paying either?? Great way to help with accountability …. N O T
AMAZING tracker, absolutely terrible app
Let’s start with the good: the actual functionality of this app is amazing, far superior to MyFitnessPal and pretty much any other tracker that I’ve ever seen. The ONLY reason I am not going to be subscribing for longer than the first month is the continual, distractingly glaring graphical issues that happen as soon as you turn on apple health sync. Constant, app-crashing gray boxes sliding from the bottom of the screen, the iPad app will shrink itself down into windowed format and then soft-lock as soon as you interact with any widgets, the list goes on and on. Lots of promise, won’t be switching permanently.
Too much…
Nutrition tracking is okay, but searching for something else. Way too many ads in non-paid version. Have used other ad-supported apps and none come close to the number and intrusiveness as experienced in Cronometer. At least one feature suggestion/request I’d like to see has gone unaddressed for years. So what are the ads and subscriptions paying for? That plus the excessive amount of identity/data tracking is why I didn’t rate higher.
Used to work better
I use the free version and the ads used to be okay because when they were finished you could close them out. Now when the ads are finished they don’t allow you to close them and I have to close the app for a while until it logs me out or until I restart my phone. I won’t be paying for this app as there are tons of free fitness apps to use, but I’ll be switching to a new food tracker app that doesn’t give me this headache.
Hard to use
Not intuitive and hard to add things. MyFitnessPal is just more intuitive and faster to use. This is so confusing.
Free trial? Doesn’t work well
I’ve been using this app less than a week as I’m trying to switch from Fitbit. I like some things, but I’m not sure yet whether I want to pay $60 for a year subscription. Before I have finished a week to see how the app charts my calories, and before I’ve even learned how to use all the features, I’m being constantly interrupted with ads (or blank pages where I believe ads are intended to appear). They block me from using the app! I have to keep quitting and restarting. The way this is going, it’s pretty unlikely that I will pay $60 to continue.
Recent updates have made ads extremely intrusive
Chronometer is mostly good, though a recent update has triggered ads to populate on-screen as soon as you start typing into the food database search bar. So you can’t really get through a search query without an ad.
I find this pretty predatory, and in a marketplace where there are dozens of calorie counting apps, I’ll opt for a different choice just out of principle.
I find this pretty predatory, and in a marketplace where there are dozens of calorie counting apps, I’ll opt for a different choice just out of principle.
Sentiment summary
96%
Positive (4-5★)
2%
Neutral (3★)
2%
Negative (1-2★)
