Search an app store for “supplement tracker” and you get dozens of results that look much the same in their screenshots: a list, a few ticks, a chart. The differences do not show on day one. They show in week three, when you are either still logging or you have stopped.
I build one of these apps myself. So here are the criteria I would use in your place, followed by an honest account of where RecTake fits and where it does not. There is deliberately nothing here about other apps. They change faster than this text, and you can check every criterion against any app yourself.
The criterion that matters most: what one entry costs
What decides it is how long a single entry takes, because that determines whether you are still making it in week three.
Count the steps while you try an app: open it, pick a category, find the product, type the amount, choose a unit, confirm the time, save. With seven intakes a day, every one of those steps becomes something you eventually skip. Also check:
- Several things at once. Hardly anyone takes just one thing in the morning. Is it one go or five?
- Groups for what never changes. Whatever is the same every morning should be a single tap.
In RecTake you say the entry: “two magnesium capsules and a coffee” gives you two entries with the time. A routine groups whatever recurs, and the app suggests routines from your own history. Why exactly this point sinks so many diaries is explained in A supplement diary you keep for longer than two weeks.
Supplements and medication kept apart, count and dose too
A useful app keeps supplements and medication apart and distinguishes between how many capsules you took and the dose in each one.
Both sound like details, and both decide later whether the data is any good. “Two capsules of 400 milligrams” is two pieces of information, not one. An app that turns it into “2” or “400” loses half of it. And if medication and supplements end up in one pile, you arrive at the doctor’s with a list somebody first has to sort.
RecTake keeps both as separate entry types in the same history and stores count, form and dose separately. If you did not say an amount, it stays empty instead of being guessed. If the app does not know a name, it asks, and whatever you teach it goes into its vocabulary.
Reminders that don’t drive you away
Reminders should be switchable one by one, respect quiet hours and never tell you to take something.
After too many forms, too many notifications are the surest way to lose interest in an app. Check whether you set the times and intervals yourself and whether the nights stay quiet. And read what the notifications actually say. “Nothing logged yet today” is a memory aid. “Time for your magnesium” is an instruction about a product.
RecTake has three kinds. It can ask about your mood at regular times, which is off by default. It asks how you are a while after you log an intake, at most three times a day. And it reminds you of what is usual when something you normally log at this time is missing today. You set your own quiet hours; the default is 10 pm to 7 am. No notification tells you to take anything.
Mood belongs right next to it
A tracker that only counts intakes answers what you took, not how you felt while taking it.
If you are trying something out, the second question is usually the one you care about. That means there has to be room next to each intake for how the day went, without a second app. Check whether the app knows a mood entry and whether it allows free notes for whatever fits no category.
In RecTake, mood is an entry type of its own with five levels. “I feel tired” is enough as a sentence. Everything else becomes a note, spoken or typed.
A history you can actually find things in
After three weeks you need a view in which you can compare days and search for a single product.
A chart full of ticks tells you that you were diligent. It does not tell you which days something was missing or what else happened on those days. Look for a day, week and month view, and for search.
And be wary of analyses that name a connection for you. For one person, with no comparison and with their own expectations, “product X improves your mood” is a guess that looks like a result. That is why RecTake deliberately calculates nothing. The history lays out what happened, and you draw the conclusion.
Export: your data has to be able to leave
Before your first entry, check whether you can take your data with you as a file that is readable without the app.
A spreadsheet in CSV format opens in any spreadsheet program, and a text file or a PDF can be printed or shown to your doctor. Without an export, your data effectively belongs to the app.
RecTake exports the whole history as a text file or a spreadsheet, and single days, weeks or months as a PDF. What happens when you switch phones is covered in Switching phones: what happens to my entries?
Privacy: where the entries are stored
What you record about supplements, medication and mood is health data, so it is worth checking where it is stored and who can see it.
Three places help: the privacy policy, the privacy details on the store page (“App Privacy” in the App Store, “Data safety” on Google Play), and whether you need an account and what that account stores.
With RecTake, entries sit in a database on your phone. The account knows your email address and your subscription, not your entries. Speech recognition is done by your phone’s operating system, and the recording does not leave the device. There is no analytics SDK and no advertising ID. The other side of this: there is no sync between devices and no copy in the cloud either.
Requirements and cost
Find out beforehand whether your phone can run the app fully and what it costs after the trial.
RecTake’s speech recognition runs on Android 13 or newer with a language pack installed, and on iPhone XS or XR and newer, where the language you speak has to be one of the phone’s own languages. If your phone cannot do that, you type instead. Price and trial are in the FAQ.
The criteria at a glance
This table sums up how to check each criterion while you try an app.
| Criterion | How to check it |
|---|---|
| Effort per entry | Count the steps, once for your whole morning round |
| Supplements and medication apart | Two entry types in the same history |
| Count and dose apart | Enter “two capsules of 400 milligrams” and see what arrives |
| Mood and notes | Both in the same app, without a detour |
| Reminders | Switchable one by one, quiet hours, no “take it now …” |
| History and search | Day, week, month and a search for a name |
| Export | A file that is readable without the app |
| Privacy | Where entries are stored, what the account knows, whether analytics run alongside |
| Requirements | System version, language pack, price after the trial |
When RecTake is not the right choice
RecTake is not for you if you expect sync between devices, nutrition values, sleep data or automatic analysis.
- No sync between devices. Entries live on one phone. Log on two devices and you have two separate diaries.
- No nutrition values, no calorie targets. If that is what you want, a calorie counter suits you better. The difference is described in RecTake and Cal AI.
- Sleep is a note. There is no sleep measurement of its own.
- No connection to your phone’s health apps.
- No interaction checks, no dosing, no recommendations. That belongs with your pharmacist.
And if a notebook or your notes app works for you and you have kept it up for weeks: stay with it. An app only starts to pay off once writing things down by hand costs you too much time.
RecTake isn’t in the store yet. If you would like to hear when it is, join the waitlist. You will get exactly one message.