Nara Baby vs Little Steps

I will start with the awkward part. Nara Baby is free. Not free with a paywall two taps in, actually free, with no in app purchases listed at all. It has 23,000 ratings at 4.9 stars, it runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Vision, and it covers pregnancy and postpartum for the parent as well as the baby, which nothing else here does.

If your budget for a baby tracker is zero, and a lot of budgets are zero right now, you should go and get Nara. I mean that. It is a good app made by people who are clearly trying.

There are still two reasons I did not just use it, and they are worth twenty minutes of your attention before you decide.

Nara’s App Store privacy label declares a Data Used to Track You section carrying Usage Data. That is the specific heading Apple uses for data that follows you across other companies’ apps and websites. Their label also lists Advertising Data under App Functionality.

Little Steps has no Data Used to Track You section, because there is no analytics library in the app, no advertising library, and no crash reporter. It carries the code for the App Store purchase and Apple’s local notifications. That is all of it.

This is not an accusation. Somebody has to pay for a free app that 23,000 people rate, and this is one of the ordinary ways that happens. But it is the trade you are making, and you cannot see it from the price. Both labels are on both listings and take about ten seconds to read.

Nara shares across caregivers and devices, so this is not a thing they lack. The difference is what a caregiver has to do to join in.

Little Steps runs in a browser. The whole app, at a web address, same account, same data. My mother in law is not going to install an app, make an Apple account and learn a new interface to write down that the baby had four ounces at two. She will open a link on the iPad that is already on her counter. That single fact is why more of our day actually ends up recorded.

Being straight about the other side of it: Nara is native on iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. Little Steps is an iPhone app plus a browser. On an iPad you get the browser version, which lays out properly on a big screen and is genuinely pleasant, but it is a web page and Nara’s is a real iPad app. If you want a Watch app, we do not have one at all.

If Nara is free and good, the honest question is why anyone would pay us anything at all. This is most of my answer, and I know how it sounds.

Tracking a newborn is relentless. You are doing it exhausted, in the dark, one handed, for months. I could not make that shorter, so I tried to make it nicer.

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.

Most of Little Steps is free too, and the free tier is not a trial. Nine categories, unlimited entries, growth percentiles on the WHO and CDC charts, night mode, multiple children, and your data out as a file whenever you want it. You can use it forever without paying.

The unlock buys the parts that took the longest to build: Sleep Trail, the insights and the printable report for the pediatrician, reminders, Lock Screen timers, and inviting other caregivers. One purchase covers everyone you invite.

One last thing, and I mean it. If $4.99 is not realistic right now, email me and I will turn Pro on for you. No explanation needed. Nobody should be choosing a worse tool for their newborn over five dollars.