HitMeal Calorie & Food Tracker

What it does

HitMeal is a comprehensive nutrition and fitness companion designed to help users manage their dietary intake and achieve health goals. The app offers detailed calorie and macronutrient tracking, personalized meal plans, intermittent fasting timers, and an extensive library of recipes. Users can log food, track activities, and monitor their progress over time through visual charts and diaries.

Where it shines

The app's strength lies in its highly structured yet flexible approach to food logging. The onboarding quiz (00:12) gathers detailed user information to create a personalized plan, which is then cleverly summarized on the paywall (01:08), directly connecting user intent to the paid value. The main diary screen is a powerful dashboard, providing an at-a-glance view of calories, macros, and daily meals. Furthermore, the food logging system itself is robust, offering multiple ways to add entries, from simple search to creating custom recipes (04:20), catering to various user needs.

UX highlights

Dynamic Goals: The app recalculates daily calorie goals in real-time when a user logs an activity (02:05) or updates their weight (02:26), making the plan feel adaptive and responsive.
Multi-modal Input: The food logging screen (02:35) provides four clear entry points: barcode scanning, creating new food, building a recipe, or quick calorie entry. This versatility reduces friction.
Integrated Fasting: The fasting feature is seamlessly integrated into the main diary, with clear timers and plans, rather than being a separate, isolated function (05:35).
Actionable Recipe Filters: The recipe filtering system (09:51) is granular, allowing users to filter by meal type, calorie count, cooking time, and other categories, making discovery easy.
Clear Visual Hierarchy: The main diary uses cards and progress bars effectively, clearly separating calorie balance, meal sections, and other trackers like water and activity.
Interactive Onboarding: Using sliders for numerical input (00:23) and animated reinforcement screens (01:05) makes the initial setup process more engaging than a standard form.

Monetization & growth

HitMeal presents a soft paywall immediately after the onboarding quiz. The paywall cleverly uses the user's own data to frame the subscription as a personalized solution (01:08). It features a prominent discount on the annual plan and shows the price broken down per week to make it seem more affordable. A toggle allows users to easily opt into a 3-day free trial (01:18), which then leads to the standard App Store purchase flow. The app also uses an in-app prompt to ask for a rating after a user completes a core action (05:22).

Who it’s for

This app is ideal for individuals who want a structured and data-driven approach to weight loss, fitness, or healthy eating. Its detailed tracking and planning features would appeal to users who are new to calorie counting as well as experienced trackers who want robust tools. The extensive meal plans and recipe database also make it suitable for people looking for dietary inspiration and guidance, not just tracking.

Notes & opportunities

The app is feature-rich, but this can create some complexity. For example, the barcode scanner failed to find an item (02:49), which could be a point of frustration. While it offered alternatives, improving scanner accuracy is key. Similarly, deleting an activity synced from the Health app requires the user to go to the Health app itself (07:54), a slightly disjointed experience. Simplifying this cross-app interaction could improve usability.