Baby trackers, side by side

I chart for a living. When my first son was born I still could not work out from anybody’s pages which tracker to use. Everything says it tracks feeds and sleep. Everything has a nice screenshot. Several of the things I wanted were missing from most of the apps I looked at.

So these pages are the comparison I went looking for and did not find. Every figure comes from the other app’s own App Store listing or their own website, and every page names where they beat our app, because in some places they do.

What it really costs over a year. A tracker is something you open twenty times a day for two years. Priced by the year rather than the month, the gap between one payment and $14.99 a month is most of a car seat.

Whether it tracks you. Apple makes every app publish a privacy label. The heading to look for is Data Used to Track You, which means data used to follow you across other companies’ apps and websites. Two of the three apps below declare one. Health information I write at work is covered by HIPAA; the same information typed into a consumer app on your own phone is not. That catches people out, and it is worth two taps before you commit.

Whether other people can actually use it. A tracker only works if everyone who holds the baby writes it down. This is a handoff, and handoffs fail at the join: if getting in means an app install, an Apple account and a new interface to learn, half your household may never benefit from it.

Little Steps runs in a browser. Not a companion dashboard, the whole app, at a web address, on the same account and the same data as the phone. This means anyone can access it.

Little Steps runs in a browser. Not a companion dashboard, the whole app, at a web address, on the same account and the same data as the phone.

I did not expect this to matter as much as it does. Anyone you want logging can open a web page instead of downloading an app, on a laptop, a tablet, or the phone already in their hand. No App Store, no Apple account, and no new interface to learn before they can write down a nap.

The same goes for a laptop at work, or an Android phone, or a partner who has not got round to it. Huckleberry’s own site offers the App Store and Google Play and nothing else. Nara is native on more Apple devices than we are, including a real iPad app that ours is not, but it is still an app you have to install.

Every app on this page is filed under Medical on the App Store, and most of them look it. I spend my working life with software that looks like that, and it is the right call for a chart a clinician reads once. This is a chart you open twenty times a day for two years, most of it exhausted, a lot of it in the dark.

That is what happens when you save a feed. The little round picture on the button grows into the video, some confetti drifts down in whatever colour theme you picked, and it is gone in three seconds. Every one of the nine categories has its own creature and its own clip: a deer for sleep, a hedgehog for diapers, an otter for pumping, a beaver for growth. Custom events get to pick from ten more.

Look at those two clips again. The night one is not the day one with a filter over it. It is the same bear painted a second time, by moonlight, with fireflies. There are two of everything, all the way through, because the app you use at 2am should not be the daytime app with the brightness turned down.

There is a bear in the feeding timer, too. Start a feed and after a moment a cub rises up from behind the timer card, has a look around, and ducks back down. It does nothing. It is not a feature. My wife found it at four in the morning on about day nine and it is the only thing about any of these apps that has ever made her laugh at that hour.

Free, and then $4.99 once if you want the rest. The free tier is not a trial and does not expire.