These apps look gimmicky but they are growing like crazy. CalAI, for example, is making 35M+/yr. I’m hoping that some people really find value in these apps and that they are not just a pure marketing driven play.
I've heard from someone who knows that they're scamming people like crazy. Supposedly they also setup a bunch of LLCs to hire influencers then never paid them.
I don’t mind if the reality of their business is similar to gyms in the sense that they make money off of peoples desires but have low utilization.
I used calorie counter apps before and they helped me lose weight (by mostly educating me what to eat/avoid). With these apps, I feel like the core premise - counting calories - isn’t even working and they’re selling people hopes and dreams. That’s danger territory.
That’s exactly what I was thinking when I read the article. ”Why are you thinking this is meant to work?”. But of course, normal trusting people will believe it if it’s on the ”trusted app stores”.
These apps with graphs are just selling you a sense of control, of compulsive metric driven decision making. Its partly the consumers’ own fault – many people won’t care even if they knew. But it’s also predatory by the companies. It’s consumer tech in a nutshell: put a pretty but shitty app on the App Store, spend 80% on marketing, show ads in the free tier, sell overpriced premium offerings to those who are careless with money, rinse and repeat. I follow some subreddits and groups for ”entrepreneurs” and it’s just like this.
There is good money in the App Store once you crack social marketing. The founder shows several videos of reloading the App Store Connect page showing revenue numbers. It's not unbelievable.
This makes me sad. Yes a fool and their money are soon parted but this drives user expectations for apps even lower, pushing competent apps out of the market because of the price difference.
I suspect this might be because diet marketing before AI was one of the most fraught with misinformation subjects you could run across. This is because the "sale" of the idea has an effect on every salesman, so all of the salesmen are trying to sell every thing at once,since that's also selling their thing, and ground truth gets stampeded. Now when you combine diet marketing and AI, you get a multiplier. Both in the sellers and the buyers, since the desire to believe is stacked.
