Something happens in your mid-30s. You can’t just eat whatever you want and assume it’ll sort itself out. The metabolism you took for granted in your 20s starts sending you polite reminders that it’s clocking off early. Your relationship with food gets more complicated. You think about it more. You worry about it more.
Chris and I have been building mobile apps together at Add Jam for over a decade now. We’ve built products for clients across healthcare, education and mobility. But when it came to our own health, we were both frustrated by the same thing: the apps that exist today either demand too much of you or do too little.
So we each built something. Two different problems. Two different approaches. Both born out of the same realisation that we needed to take this stuff more seriously.
My problem: food noise
I don’t know when it started exactly. But at some point I noticed that food was occupying an unreasonable amount of my headspace. Not hunger. Not mealtimes. Just… thoughts about food that showed up uninvited.
You know the feeling. You’re preparing for a client presentation and suddenly you’re thinking about the tub of ice cream in the freezer. The kids got creme eggs at Easter and even though they’re stuffed in a cupboard under the stairs, you know they’re there. You’re trying to concentrate on a code review and your brain helpfully reminds you that there are biscuits in the kitchen.
It’s called food noise and it’s far more common than people realise. For some people it’s a background hum. For others it’s genuinely distracting. I wanted to understand my own patterns better. When does it happen? How strong is it? Are there triggers I’m not aware of?
I couldn’t find an app that tracked the noise itself rather than the food. Everything out there wants you to log meals, count calories, scan barcodes. I didn’t need a food diary. I needed a thought diary. Specifically for food.
What I built
Food Noise Tracker is deliberately minimal. You notice food noise. You open the app, tap your watch or use a home screen widget. You rate the intensity from 1 to 10. That’s it.
No food logging. No calorie counting. No meal photos. The app tracks the intrusive thoughts, not what you eat. Over time it builds a picture using commit-style heatmaps and time-of-day breakdowns so you can see when your food noise peaks. Maybe it’s always mid-afternoon. Maybe weekends are worse than weekdays. Maybe it spikes around certain events.
Once you can see the pattern you can be proactive about it. If you know 3pm is your danger zone you can plan for it. Go for a walk, have a healthy snack ready, or just acknowledge it and let it pass. The awareness itself is useful.
The app runs on iPhone, Android, Apple Watch and Wear OS with home screen widgets on iOS. All data stays on your device. There are no accounts, no servers, no analytics. It’s your data and nobody else’s.
I wrote about the full technical build including the SwiftUI widgets and watch app if you’re interested in how we handled the native integrations alongside React Native.
Chris’s problem: tracking fatigue
Chris had a different but related frustration. He’d tried MyFitnessPal, Noom and a few others. They all worked. For about two weeks. The problem wasn’t the apps. The problem was that logging every single thing you eat is genuinely exhausting. You become obsessive about it. You start weighing pasta. You feel guilty when you forget to scan something. And then one day you just stop and all the awareness you built up disappears overnight.
His question was simple. What if you could get 80% of the benefit with 5% of the effort? What if instead of tracking every gram of food that goes into your body, you just honestly answered one question each day: did you eat well today?
What Chris built
Weight Habits asks you one question every evening. Did you eat well, ok or poorly? No judgement. No scary numbers. No macro breakdowns. Just an honest assessment of your day.
The idea is that sustained awareness is more valuable than detailed tracking that you abandon after a fortnight. If you check in every day, even with something as simple as a traffic-light rating, you stay mindful of your eating habits. You build a streak. You don’t want to break the streak. The behaviour reinforces itself.
The clever bit is the friends feature. You connect with a mate by sharing a code and you can see each other’s check-in streaks. Not weights. Not food logs. Just whether they showed up today. You can send each other encouragements from a set list. It’s accountability without the pressure of a social feed or a leaderboard.
Chris chose to build it with Firebase so the social features work in real-time. When your friend checks in you see it straight away. It’s that gentle nudge of “they’re keeping at it, I should too.”
The full case study covers the technical approach including how we handled anonymous auth, real-time sync and the 98 end-to-end Maestro tests that keep the whole thing solid.
Same frustration, different angles
What’s interesting is that we started from the same place (health in our 30s is harder than it used to be) and ended up building two genuinely different products. Mine is about understanding your mind. Chris’s is about changing your behaviour. Mine is completely offline and private. Chris’s has a social layer baked in. Mine is about a single specific problem. Chris’s is about a daily habit.
But they share the same design principle: ask less of the user. Both apps were built as a reaction to the health app market being full of products that demand too much and then wonder why nobody sticks with them past January.
If your health app asks someone to log everything they eat three times a day, you’d better have a very compelling reason for all that friction. For most people, a lighter touch works better. The app that survives on your phone is the one that respects your time.
What we learned building them
A few things stood out from building both of these:
The first version should be embarrassingly simple. Food Noise Tracker v1 was literally a button and a number. No heatmaps, no insights, no watch app. We used it ourselves for a few weeks to validate the core idea before building anything else. If the basic loop doesn’t work, no amount of features will save it.
Health apps need to earn trust fast. People are sharing something personal. The onboarding, the tone, the visual design all need to say “this is a safe space” without being patronising about it. We spent more time on the first-run experience than on most of the feature work.
Native platform integration matters for health apps. Food noise doesn’t wait until you’re sitting at your desk with your phone unlocked. It hits you in a queue, on a walk, in a meeting. If logging requires opening an app, unlocking your phone and navigating to a screen, you won’t do it. Widgets and watch apps aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re essential for capturing the moment.
Testing health apps thoroughly is non-negotiable. Data integrity matters when someone is tracking their wellbeing over months. A bug that loses a week of check-ins or miscounts a streak isn’t just annoying. It damages trust. Both apps have comprehensive end-to-end test suites for exactly this reason.
Try them
Both apps are free and available now. Food Noise Tracker is on iOS, Android, Apple Watch and Wear OS. Weight Habits is on iOS and Android.
If you’ve got your own idea for a health or wellness app and want to talk about how to build it properly, book a free chat or check out our mobile development services.
