Best Food Tracking Apps for Android in 2020

I recently restarted my fitness journey, and with that came a radical shift to my diet. For years, I thought that if I ate less, or not at all, I would lose the weight I had gained since injuring my knee a few years ago. I was wrong. Changes needed to be made, and I was forced to make conscious decisions to upend my terrible dietary habits.

So here are the best food tracking apps for Android, which can help you gain some perspective on your diet just like they did for me. When you’ve taken a gander through our list here, be sure to head over to our best Android apps roundup for some more great app ideas.

I’m glad you asked. As you might have guessed at this point, there are a lot of food tracking apps on the Play Store. You have your big names, some of which are featured here on our list, but it’s hard sometimes to dig through all the chaff to find the good stuff. We’ve done the leg work, so here are the best food tracking apps for Android.

Our top pick is Food Diary. We chose this one because of its simplicity; it doesn’t have any sort of account or subscription model. It’s just a food diary, as the name suggests, and it perfectly fits the needs of most people.

Following that is See How You Eat, a wonderful app that really shakes up how you view your dietary changes. It seems to follow more of the Intuitive Eating approach, helping you heal your relationship with food.

Our final top pick is FatSecret Calorie Counter. If Food Diary was too simplistic and minimal for you, but you still want to keep things low key, then FatSecret Calorie Counter is for you. It has additional features like a barcode scanner, as well.

1. Food Diary

When I was looking for a calorie tracker as I was trying to figure out what exactly I was consuming on a typical day (hint: not nearly enough whole foods), I found Food Diary. My criteria included an app that didn’t require an account or a subscription to unlock the full suite of features. Food Diary met those criteria.

It’s extremely basic, letting you enter your calorie counts for each meal. Since it lacks a database for you to search, you need to either read the label on your food or do your research. I’d say that’s its biggest downside for most people, but I didn’t mind since the data stays local to my phone.

There are ads, but you can remove them to support the developer. Food Diary is an unobtrusive, minimal app that gets the job done very well and without fanfare. You can backup your data to a local file to restore later, there’s a calendar for a bird’s eye view of your meals, and it lets you add additional facets to your diary (like supplements, medications, and exercise). It’s become a new staple on my phone alongside my favorite workout log app.

See How You Eat is a different kind of food tracking app. Instead of being focused on counting calories, it tries to make you more aware of what you’re eating at the moment. It reminds me of the Intuitive Eating movement, which opposes what we typically think of when we want to lose weight (aka restriction diets).

It’s actually a system I quite like since it asks you to think critically about what you’re eating versus what your body needs. There’s a focus on whole foods, eating when hungry, and stopping when full. See How You Eat wants you to take photos of your meals for your logs, which in turn helps you make better choices for the next one.

It’s easy to fall off the bandwagon because of one bad meal or choice, but See How You Eat wants to keep you encouraged to do better the next time around, instead of giving up. It’s a really neat app and one I recommend if you want something completely different than the usual calorie counting routine.

For those of you who want a more traditional calorie tracker, then look no further than FatSecret. It’s a full-featured app that also does its best to be as minimal as possible. Whereas other apps, some of which are on this list, bombard you with options and features, FatSecret keeps things simple yet powerful.

FatSecret lets you keep track of your meals, your exercise, and your weight. Not only is there a big database of items to slot into your meal logs, but there’s also a barcode scanner to go in tandem with that database. You even get Google Fit integration.

Finally, FatSecret boasts a community element to keep you motivated and engaged. When you do things alone, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, so having a community of people going through the same thing can be really helpful for your success. FatSecret syncs with an account and is free, with a subscription unlocking more features.

Though they didn’t quite make the top 3, here are several more food tracking options for you to check out!

MyFitnessPal

And here we have the one that everyone knows, MyFitnessPal. It’s a robust app full of conveniences like a barcode scanner, a huge database of food items, and a recipe importer, to name a few!

Of course, the biggest downside is the subscription model that is pushed in your face. Under Armour really wants you to sign up for the premium version. There’s a ton to like about MyFitnessPal, especially all of the integrations it supports, including physical devices for workout tracking. Goal tracking is also a well-loved feature.

Fooducate has the usual stuff that you’d expect in a food tracker app, but the reason why it’s on our list is because of the steps it takes to go beyond that. It will keep a record of things you eat and when you exercise, but its primary goal is to help you understand what you ate.

That means that you can morph your eating habits over time to consume more whole foods and live a better life. In changing your diet slowly and building better habits, you’ll find that the weight loss will come in due course. That’s what makes Fooducate special, in that it hopes to help you change your relationship with food, much like See How You Eat does.

Protein Tracker does just what the name says. It helps you to make sure that you’re feeding your muscles enough protein, which is especially important for people working out and looking to pack on lean mass. You start by telling the app how many grams of protein you want a day, and it will calculate what you’ve consumed based on the meals you input.

The kicker is that you need to know how much protein your meal contained, which may require a bit of research to find out. But you can look at your history to see where you need to improve, maybe by adding another chicken breast throughout the day or more quinoa with lunch. It’s a neat app for visualizing your protein consumption, and for that reason, it earns a spot on our list.

In the fitness world, there’s a diet technique called If It Fits Your Macros (IIFYM), which boils down to eating what you want within the bounds of your daily needs for fats, protein, and carbs. It’s a good starting point for understanding nutrition, for sure, and Stupid Simple Macros Tracker can help you visualize your macros.

Simply tell the app your macro goals and then what you’ve eaten that day. You can “save” macros for later, in case of special events and the like, and you can also tag foods with cute icons to help you categorize what you’ve eaten. There’s a great database for searching for and adding foods, too.

Lose It! is another calorie tracking app, but it does so exceptionally well. It also can track calories based on the pictures you take of your food, though it seems a bit inconsistent. Beyond just calories and macros, Lose It! lets you track workouts, water, sugar, and sleep cycles to give you a holistic view of your diet and fitness.

Lose It! is free with a subscription for extra features. It’s got a huge list of things it can do, so be sure to check out this app if you’re looking for something new. It even has workout guides to get you started on getting in shape!

Another popular option out there is Lifesum, a calorie tracking extraordinaire. It just does everything so well, like meal plans, macro counting, multiple supported diets (keto, low-carb, etc.), and a lot more. There’s also Google Fit integration to boot.

It’s also one of the prettiest apps on our list with a gorgeous implementation of Material Design. The app is, however, focused on making sure that you improve yourself over time by building better habits, not just looking pretty.

MyNetDiary boasts some of the best features on this list. It sports a massive food database, all the regular food tracking amenities, and impressive hardware support. In so doing, it aids in keeping you aware of your diet and fitness, letting you track the finer details like glucose levels, heart rate, and more.

You can set goals and timeframes for those goals (like an upcoming vacation, a holiday with family, etc.), and the app will spit out a customized calorie plan built for your needs. From then on, just log your meals and your exercise, and you’ll be on your way toward meeting your goal. You can also track a ton of different macro- and micronutrients to make sure your diet is as whole as possible.