Moderation
A radically simple food diary.
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Dominic Williams

Moderation - A radically simple food diary.

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Moderation
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A radically simple food diary, with a beautiful iOS-centric UI, which aims to bring the fun back to tracking what you eat.
The App presents a simple interface to quickly record if what you have eaten was healthy or not, all from just one tap per meal 🙌

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Anna Filou
I love this, can you please please please make an Android version?! 😍 EDIT: just tried to download this on my iPad to test it out but it’s not available in my country, Austria :/ I don’t understand why an app like this cannot be available globally. I would understand it if the food database was specific to a certain country but there is no food database.
Dominic Williams
Maker
@anna_0x Hi Anna - once we reach enough users to justify developing an Android version, we definitely plan on doing so! At the moment we are just seeing if the market agrees with us with our approach. We've only been on the App Store a few months and the App is still very much an MVP in our eyes so we limited the countries initially to try and gather some feedback, and then release more widely when we have a fully featured product. I've just turned on Austria so you should be able to download it in a few hours (once Apple's servers propagate the information)
Anna Filou
@1337domz great, it is available now! Honestly, I still don’t understand how limiting which countries have access to the app helps with the early feedback. More countries means more chances for feedback, am I wrong? Anyhow, I really like the app! I’ve been looking for something simple that allows me to simply log wheather or not my meals were healthy. The “Noom” app used to do something similar years ago (green, yellow and red foods) but they don’t anymore so I was left with only the over complicated alternatives. Some feedback: * multiple snacks are a must. I really don’t know any one person that only eats a single snack per day 😛 I read in your FAQ that you are planning to add this though. * I log a meal and an emoji gets assigned to it. I log another meal and the emoji of the first meal changes as well. Why is that? IMO it’s just unnecessarily confusing. * how about adding a way to log the size of the meal? Small, medium, large? For example, a small unhealthy snack (e.g. a fun sized piece of candy) shouldn’t count as much as a huge omelet and salad for breakfast.
Dominic Williams
Maker
@anna_0x Sorry, I probably didn't explain very well. My main reasons for holding back a wider release were: • Initial fears that the App doesn't have enough functionality, or people needing an on boarding experience, or other unknowns, that might result in the app being reviewed poorly and rated poorly in the App Store. I first launched it in just the UK, then I opened it up to other larger English speaking countries as the downloads from the UK were quite small. • I wasn't sure of the translation expectations from customers where English isn't the native language. Looking at competitors to my apps, they all have a multitude of translations and this was some complexity I wanted to avoid early on • Some worries about having to deal with support from countries where I don't speak the native language I'm not saying they are rational, they probably aren't! Some great feedback. The emoji changing all the time is an annoyance and something I plan on fixing. It's just an outcome of the way the entire UI is refreshed when things are changed, and those emoji's are just picked randomly. I hadn't really thought about the meal size functionality (it seems obvious now you've mentioned it!), so I've added that onto our list of feature ideas as well. Thanks! Dom
Anna Filou
@1337domz fantastic, glad to hear that! Ok, I hadn't thought about all those things and now understand why you chose to have a limited release. As I've never made an app, let alone submitted it to any App Store, I had not thought about all those things you mentioned but it actually does make sense. By the way, I'd be happy to translate the content of the app for free (there's not much text anyway 😛) into German and Greek so let me know if you're considering localization. Wish you the best of luck and hope to see the App in the Google Play Store soon!
Dominic Williams
Maker
Hi everyone - thanks for dropping by and checking out my app. I created Moderation to solve a few issues I had with apps aimed at helping you track what you eat: • Most of them are painful to use for anyone who appreciates good design. They have bad design patterns, lots of cruft, and ultimately they want to keep you in the app as much as possible so your eyeballs are on ads 👀. With Moderation my goal has been to minimise the amount of time you spend in the app. Logging food is one tap, and the home screen on the app has little distraction, so you only explore the insights or other parts of the app when you want to. I plan on making it even easier to log what you eat, with interactive notifications and watch and Siri integrations. • Most of the apps in this space are very good at taking your data and using it for nefarious purposes. Understandably there is a lot of value in health related data with insurance companies and food and supplement companies being examples of ones that would pay for this data. MyFitnessPal were caught up in another privacy scandal just a few days ago involving their Facebook integration. With Moderation my focus was to take the data the app collects, and try and provide useful insights back to the user. We don't require an account to be created, so all your data stays on you device, and we will never show ads. If you have any questions give me a shout? Thanks Dom
Angelo Embuldeniya
Nice concept @1337domz and thanks for making Moderation. Are there any premium subscription plans in the works as I understand your app won't be displaying ads? How are you planning to sustain this interesting nutrition app please?
Dominic Williams
Maker
@angeloe Great question! The plan is to eventually monetise through a subscription model, however I don't believe in crippling the core experience (by reducing features or showing ads) as a way of achieving this, so we will use a simple guiding principle when deciding if a feature would be available to subscribers only: Is this considered a core feature of tracking your food, for the majority of our users? Some examples of things we feel don't meet that requirement, and are likely to become upcoming pro features are: • The ability to have 'custom meals'. For example, some people might not follow the traditional breakfast/lunch/dinner routine, and instead have 6 small meals throughout the day. This feature would allow them to create and name their 'meals' how they see fit • Additional complexity with the food logging process, such as a sliding scale of healthiness, or being able to add tags to meals so you can later gain insights based on those • Cosmetic niceties, such as a dark mode, or being able to choose the emoji assigned to the meal, etc
Ethan Steininger
I like the premise of binary healthy vs unhealthy categorization but is there anyway you can go slightly deeper in what is recorded on the app?
Dominic Williams
Maker
@ethans100 Hi Ethan - It's definitely something we plan on offering in the future. We'll always keep the binary option as the default I think, but we'd allow users to enable a sliding scale version (think of the Instagram emoji sliding UI) and some other potential neat UI ideas we have up our sleeves. We know macros are important to a lot of users of these apps, and while we will never track exactly what you eat like some of our competitors, we might create some optional functionality, so if you wanted to quickly track your protein intake for example, you could enable a function that added this to the UI in a quick and easy way.
Ryan Hoover
While calorie counting can be laborious, I find it the most effective way to manage weight.
Dominic Williams
Maker
@rrhoover Hi Ryan, I agree it's definitely the most effective, as calories in and calories out is the fundamental mechanism of managing weight. It's also the most 'effort' in my opinion. I've used various calorie counting apps over the years, and I don't think I've ever lasted longer than 30 days with any of them. As I've started eating healthier, more of what I eat isn't easily converted to calories with these apps because it's home cooked, which encourages me to not bother logging at all. Before I made Moderation I imagined a 4x4 matrix, with effort on one axis and effectiveness on the other. Calorie counting apps are high effort / highly effective. Things like Fitbit and step counters are low effort (just strap it to your wrist!), but not very effective. I'm hoping Moderation can get more people into the effective quadrant, but reducing the effort required. As a side note, I think it's massively important to be calorie aware. Simple things like orange juice can have a surprising amount of sugar and calories. I foresee an extra piece to Moderation which is an education piece, so people are better informed to know when to hit the 'Healthy' button. Out of curiosity, what app do you use to count calories?
Damian Nurzyński
I like the simplicity, but would love to see the water consumption tracking (even binary enough/not-enough) as it seems to be a related problem to track.
Dominic Williams
Maker
@dnurzynski Hi Damian, thanks for the feedback and I totally agree with the water tracking and it's something on our backlog!
Saoud Rizwan
Not only are other calorie counting apps too complicated, but they all charge monthly fees because the APIs behind them are egregiously expensive. $300/month for 200 active users on Nutritionix. Not to mention the NDB API is down due to lack of federal funding https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/sea... It is truly quite a mess in the nutrition API space.
Edward Dowling
This is such a great, easy-to-use app. Love the animations and motivation nudges - complete a full day, then complete a full week. Great work. I tend to practice Intermittent Fasting. I usually skip dinner. It would be awesome to be able to hide a meal.
Justin Rockmore
Just discovered this and I have to say I love the UI and simplicity! I do with we had a UI like this with some of the more comprehensive food tracking features though!
Danilo Prado
I love the idea, and by personal experience I dropped many apps since I was spending too much time, counting calories and logging meals. My only concern is that a lot of people think they're eating healthy, when in fact they're not. It would be nice if the app had some sort of guidance on what's healthy or not. I have friends that think that healthy is everything that is not pizza or hamburguers. 😃 When they're eating a lot of microwave crap, that SEEMS healthy. This can be tricky if the person is not quite educated in these terms. But I like the idea, I'll give it a try.
Dominic Williams
Maker
@danilo_prado Thanks Danilo for the feedback. We agree that not everyone understands what is healthy, and we've recently launched a blog where we plan to try and educate users who are seeking support in that area. The blog won't be plastered all over the App though, it will be a resource for people to use if they chose to. From my own personal experience, I'm still learning about nutrition and discovering new foods and ideas which helps me eat healthy, so there is definitely a need for this, and we want to try and avoid the fads/nonsense that most of the industry is peddling.
Hannah K
I just downloaded Moderation because I've been trying to lose weight but just wanted to start by simply eating LESS gluten. I tried FitnessPal and SHYE (Show How You Eat), but both were too complicated and/or time-intensive/required remembering at meals, etc. So I ended up just making up an excel sheet that I color coded green and red for good or bad meals/snacks. Got to thinking about app ideas and decided to go out and see if someone had created a SIMPLE app. And I found Moderation. Logged my first meal and I LOVE how simple it is and the immediate gratification of seeing green, red, and the fun look of emojis. It's a lovely app. Couple ideas already: (might end up being additional options for premium users in the future?) - Option to add additional meals/snacks (I've think I've seen that feedback already in the comments). - Quick track option for weight. I currently like to keep track of my weight daily because it actually helps me realize that one meal doesn't mess me up as much as my brain likes to think it does. If one didn't end up weighing in, that's fine, it wouldn't be necessary. Just an option that could then be charted. - Quick track option for minutes of exercise each day. Just how many minutes, not what type or anything like that. I don't care what I do, just that I did something, and to then be able to get streaks going and charting. That being said, I understand that Moderation is only about food at this point. But as someone who's trying to slowly work her way towards a healthier lifestyle, all those things are helpful. Just the basic food is amazing and awesome and a great place for me to start! I do know I would be willing to pay a monthly subscription for this app to gain access to additional features. ADDED: Just want to again emphasize that with the ideas above, I totally understand if Moderation wants to stay true to just being about food!! :) The ideas are just things I'm looking for in an app, not necessarily making sure line up with Moderation's philosophy.
Dominic Williams
Maker
@hannah_k Hi Hannah! Thanks you sharing your experiences. I think anyone who has tried logging their food has resorted to a spreadsheet at some point! I'm not precious about keeping the App purely food focussed and everything you've mentioned is on a todo list 😁 I see the App becoming the simple way of tracking lots of things health related, wether that be water intake, alcohol consumption, weight or exercise. I'm working on a big release for the new year, and then I plan on adding some of the Pro features for Q2 next year. If you'd like to be part of the journey you can join the beta program here - https://testflight.apple.com/joi...