MacroFactor - Macro Tracker

Made by the people behind Stronger By Science, MacroFactor is a calorie and macro tracker whose distinguishing feature is that the targets move. Rather than fixing a number from a formula once, the app estimates your energy expenditure from what you log and what you weigh, then adjusts calories and macros each week at a check-in.

Food logging uses a barcode scanner, custom entries and a verified database, with micronutrient breakdowns. Habit and period trackers, integrations, dark mode and charts are included. You pick lose, maintain or gain at setup. There are no red warnings for going over, and a bad week is simply factored in.

Breakfast gets logged by scanning the cereal box; lunch is a saved custom meal; dinner is estimated. You weigh yourself in the morning and enter it. That's the whole daily commitment, perhaps three minutes. Once a week the check-in arrives, tells you your expenditure estimate has shifted, and nudges tomorrow's targets. After a wedding weekend where you tracked nothing accurately, you simply resume, and the numbers absorb it without a lecture. People used to apps that scold them find the silence strange for about a fortnight, then relax.

Dieters who've watched a static calorie target stop working after a month, and lifters bulking carefully, search for a tracker that adapts to their actual metabolism. The Stronger By Science name carries weight with the evidence-based fitness crowd. The deliberate absence of guilt-trip design pulls in people who found other trackers unhealthy to use.

The food log, a weekly check-in screen, an expenditure chart and the dark mode the listing mentions are the probable contents of the five-shot gallery. Nutrition trackers are numbers and progress bars by nature, and this one adds a data-visualisation layer that will appeal to spreadsheet types. The no-red-numbers philosophy should be visible in a calmer palette than its rivals.

Version 5.8.9 suggests several major revisions and plenty of patches, though no dates are given. A 4.8 from more than ten thousand reviewers is a strong result for a paid app with no free tier, where buyers are less forgiving. Stronger By Science Technologies LLC publishes it on the App Store only, per our data, with no ads to subsidise it.

Rated 9+, free to download, but the listing is explicit that it's a paid app with a seven-day trial and no ads; the price isn't stated here. An account is implied by the weekly algorithm and integrations.

You'll need camera access for the barcode scanner and permission for whichever health integrations you connect. Whether logging works offline isn't stated. There's a period tracker, which involves health data some users will want to think about. Regions aren't mentioned.