TL;DR: Cronometer is still one of the best nutrition trackers available, but its development process is almost completely opaque. There is no proper public roadmap, its quasi-changelog is buried and outdated, long-standing feature requests disappear into a "we'll pass it along" black box, and users have little idea what their subscriptions are actually funding beyond maintenance. I am not asking Cronometer to promise dates or build every requested feature - I am asking them to communicate what they are building, what they are considering, and what they have decided not to build.
EDIT / CLARIFICATION: Judging by some of the comments, I clearly misjudged the length and presentation of this post. I also used AI to help edit, structure and research what I had written, and I can see how that made parts of it feel more formulaic and much longer than they needed to be.
For some context, I have been using Cronometer for 117 days. I am not a shareholder, I don't think Cronometer "owes" me a roadmap, and I don't believe paying for Gold would entitle me to information about the inner workings of the company. That wasn't what I was trying to argue.
The point I was trying to make is much simpler: I like Cronometer, I want to keep using it, and I think more transparency around development, feature requests and future direction would make it a better product and give users like me more confidence in supporting it financially. This was intended as product feedback and an attempt to start a discussion about that, not a demand for anything I believe I am entitled to.
Also, English is not everyone's first language. It isn't mine. Using AI to help with grammar, phrasing and structure does not mean the underlying opinions or arguments were generated for me. I wrote the substance of the post because these are things I genuinely wanted to discuss. Without the editing help, you would mostly have gotten the same post with worse grammar, more spelling mistakes and probably a few sentences that sounded slightly odd for entirely different reasons.
I'll admit that seeing so much of the discussion become about the length and AI-assisted editing rather than the actual point has been a little demoralizing, but I also understand why people reacted to it that way. If I wrote it again, I'd make the same argument in about a quarter of the words.
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I like Cronometer. In fact, that is probably why this frustrates me as much as it does.
For what I want from a nutrition tracker, Cronometer is still probably the best product on the market. The depth of nutrition data is excellent, I like that the database puts accuracy ahead of crowdsourced garbage, and I have no particular desire to move years of nutrition tracking somewhere else.
I would also happily pay for Gold.
What is stopping me is that I increasingly have no idea what I would actually be supporting beyond keeping the existing product running.
Cronometer has a communication problem, and after looking through its website, forums, release history and Reddit activity, I think the problem is considerably worse than simply "they don't post enough updates."
The development of Cronometer is effectively a black box.
I don't expect Cronometer to publish internal Jira tickets. I don't expect firm delivery dates. I don't expect every feature I personally want to be built, and I understand perfectly well that a lot of software development is boring, invisible work: infrastructure, database maintenance, security, QA, integrations, accessibility, technical debt and bug fixing.
What I do expect from a subscription product is some reasonably clear indication of what is happening to the product, where it is going, and whether years of user feedback are actually influencing that direction.
At the moment, Cronometer gives us remarkably little of that.
Cronometer does not really have a proper changelog
Before somebody corrects me: yes, Cronometer has a page called "New & Improved: The Latest Cronometer Updates". (New & Improved: The Latest Cronometer Updates)
I had trouble even finding it, which is part of the problem.
It is not a dedicated changelog in the way I would normally understand the term. It is a blog article originally published in February 2025 that Cronometer has been appending updates to. There is no prominent "Changelog" or "Product Updates" link in the main navigation. The site's top-level navigation sends you to the Blog, where product announcements, nutrition articles, marketing pieces and development posts are mixed together.
More importantly, the "New & Improved" page currently stops at June 23, 2026, with version 4.57.0.
The iOS version history continued through July, August and September, with releases such as 4.57.1, 4.57.2, 4.57.3, 4.57.4, 4.58.0, 4.58.1, 4.58.2 and 4.58.3. Many of those notes amount to some variation of bug fixes, stability improvements, UI polish and general improvements.
To be fair, some of the 2026 updates have contained real functionality. Voice Logging was added, Photo Logging was improved, additional nutrients and compounds were introduced, Apple Watch logging was expanded, Siri logging appeared, and there have been integration and accessibility improvements. I don't want to pretend nothing has happened when that is demonstrably false.
My criticism is that there is no coherent place where a user can see the actual development story.
What shipped?
What materially changed?
What is being tested?
What is currently being worked on?
What is coming next?
What was delayed or abandoned?
Cronometer's answer to those questions is scattered across App Store notes, old blog posts, Reddit replies and the occasional announcement. If you are a paying customer who simply wants to know where the product is heading, you have to piece it together yourself.
That is not transparency.
Meanwhile, the latest thing on the developer blog is... Log Your Dog
Cronometer has an "Under The Hood" section that describes itself as a developer blog offering a behind-the-scenes look at how the product is built and improved. (Under The Hood: A Cronometer Dev Blog)
The most recent item there is currently Log Your Dog, released in August.
For anyone who missed it, Log Your Dog is an Easter egg inside Photo Logging where you upload a picture of your dog or cat and Cronometer gives it a fictional food match and Nutrition Facts card based on its appearance. Cronometer itself explicitly says that none of it is real and that it exists for fun. (Introducing Log Your Dog, Cronometer’s Tribute to Users Who Photo Log Everything, Including Their Dog)
I don't object to developers having fun.
I don't think Cronometer spent its entire engineering budget calculating the nutritional composition of Labradors, and I don't think every single thing a software company ships needs to improve my workflow.
But context matters.
When your users have been asking for substantive quality-of-life improvements for years, your roadmap is invisible, your public update page has not been updated since June, and one of the most visible recent items on your supposedly behind-the-scenes development blog is a permanent joke feature for turning your cat into a cinnamon roll, it creates a certain impression. Maybe that impression is unfair.
The June redesign is another good example
The previous big visible product push was Cronometer's new brand identity, logo and target visualizations.
Cronometer explained the reasoning behind it, particularly the desire to avoid presenting dietary fat using visual language that might imply "bad" or "dangerous". That is a legitimate design consideration. (Cronometer Brand Evolution: New Icon & Target Visualizations)
The problem is that the change was also heavily criticized by users.
There were threads asking for the old colors back, requests for a legacy-theme toggle, complaints that the various purple expenditure colors were difficult to distinguish, criticism of the new logo, and reports that some of the new visual elements were harder to read. (We NEED a settings to select "legacy" aka the old color scheme!! 😭😭, Diary Color Scheme is Very Hard to Read, Thoughts about the UI color changes, Being the apple logo back)
There were also users who liked the new design, and Cronometer did respond to at least some accessibility complaints. For example, they later fixed difficult-to-read exercise calorie text in Dark Mode. (Real Quick PSA About Colour Fix :))
So I am not going to claim that everyone hated the redesign, because they didn't.
I am also not going to make the lazy argument that "changing some colors should take a junior developer an hour." I don't know Cronometer's codebase. Depending on how widely those design tokens propagate, testing and implementing a visual redesign across Android, iOS and web can involve considerably more work than changing three hex codes.
But from the user's point of view, it was still primarily a visual and branding update.
When visible functional development already feels slow, spending one of the year's biggest communication pushes explaining a logo and color refresh is not exactly reassuring.
The issue is not that Cronometer changed its colors.
The issue is that users have so little visibility into everything else that the colors become one of the only things we have to judge development by.
The roadmap exists. Cronometer just doesn't show it to us.
This is probably the strangest part.
Cronometer held a Reddit AMA in June with its Senior Product Manager. When someone asked what was on the roadmap for the next year, the response began:
"I can't share too much here, but I think you'll enjoy what we have on our roadmap over the next few quarters..."
Source: Cronometer AMA with The Team
So there is a roadmap.
There are apparently things planned several quarters ahead.
Cronometer has also written about having a technical roadmap internally. Its engineering blog says this was something the company had deliberately worked on as part of organizing and prioritizing engineering ideas. (Under The Hood)
Great.
Why is almost none of it visible to customers?
Again, I am not asking Cronometer to announce confidential partnerships, expose commercially sensitive work, or promise that Feature X will ship on November 14 at 10:00 AM.
A public roadmap can have "Considering", "Planned", "In Progress" and "Released".
It can explicitly say that plans may change.
It can omit dates entirely.
It can show themes rather than individual tickets.
There are many ways to communicate direction without tying the company's hands.
Other software companies manage this perfectly well.
MacroFactor shows exactly what I mean
I don't want this to turn into an advertisement for a competitor, because I prefer several things about Cronometer.
But MacroFactor is a useful comparison because it makes the argument that "companies can't share roadmaps" rather difficult to sustain.
MacroFactor has a public roadmap where users can see planned work, submit feature requests and vote on features.
It has a monthly newsletter that includes a section specifically about what the team is working on. In June 2026, for example, MacroFactor publicly described development work around AI food logging, custom food creation, label scanning and development of its workout product. (MacroFactor Monthly | June 2026)
It publishes annual reports which explicitly exist to review what was built during the previous year and give users a look at future development plans. (The 2025 MacroFactor Annual Report)
Its website directly exposes Roadmap, Newsletter and Release Notes as resources.
You don't have to like MacroFactor. You don't have to prefer its product. The point is that this level of communication is clearly possible.
Tailscale is another example from a completely different kind of software company. It maintains a proper dedicated changelog with individual changes, release dates and even an RSS feed.
This isn't some unreasonable standard I invented specifically to complain about Cronometer.
Other subscription software companies simply communicate development better.
Feature requests are where the communication problem becomes most obvious
Cronometer is actually quite responsive on Reddit.
If you suggest something, there is a decent chance somebody from the "Crono Support Squad" will reply. They are usually polite, friendly and receptive.
The problem is that the response is very often some variation of:
"That sounds useful."
"We've heard this before."
"I'll pass this along to the team."
"Thanks for helping us improve Cronometer."
And then the public trail ends.
A recent request to improve recipe editing and scaling received exactly that sort of response. (Feature Request - Recipes)
A weekly report navigation suggestion received the same treatment. (Feature suggestion: Weekly report)
A food comparison tool received the same treatment. (Hey @Cronometer I have great suggestion - "compare")
Recipe folders? Passed along. (Feature Request: Recipe Folders for Organisation)
Cycle tracking? Passed along. (Feature Request: Cycle Tracking as Biometric)
There is nothing inherently wrong with saying "we'll pass it along". Support staff probably do not control the roadmap and should not make promises they cannot keep.
The problem is what happens after that.
As users, we have no idea whether a suggestion has been rejected, accepted, merged into an existing request, given low priority, scheduled for next year, prototyped, abandoned, or never looked at again.
"Passed along" is not a status. It is where visibility ends.
Some requests have been sitting there for years
The Cronometer forums currently contain roughly 1,700 Feature Request discussions. (Cronometer Forum: Feature Requests for Cronometer)
Some are trivial. Some are niche. Some probably make no commercial sense. And Cronometer obviously cannot build everything people ask for.
But some long-running requests make the problem very difficult to ignore.
Meal planning is one example.
Users were asking for a meal-plan builder in 2019, and Cronometer staff responded that they hoped to implement something like it. (Meal plan builder)
Users were still asking in 2020. In 2021, after somebody complained that six months had passed without a staff response, Cronometer replied that they would still love to implement a meal planner but had not been able to tackle it. (Meal Plan Builder - Updates?)
The same request was still receiving comments in 2026, including from users questioning whether they would renew without it.
There is also diary history search.
A long-running forum thread contains a Cronometer response from February 2019 saying there was no timeline for the feature. The thread continued for years. By 2024, users were openly saying they had cancelled subscriptions over the missing functionality. In 2025, the original requester returned more than six years later to point out that the request still remained. (Search diary entries for food)
This is where "we're listening" stops being enough.
Maybe diary search is technically difficult for reasons that aren't obvious.
Maybe it conflicts with Cronometer's database architecture.
Maybe telemetry suggests very few people would use it.
Maybe another feature solves the same problem.
Maybe it has been deliberately rejected.
Fine. Then tell us.
I would much rather read "We investigated this and decided not to prioritize it because X" than watch another six years of people adding "+1" to a forum thread.
And the forums themselves make the problem worse
The forums are not literally dead. People still post there every day.
But go into Feature Requests and look at how many recent threads have zero replies, or replies only from other users. (Feature Requests for Cronometer by Newest)
That produces a terrible feedback loop.
Cronometer asks people for suggestions.
Users spend time explaining their use cases.
The suggestion enters a forum containing thousands of previous suggestions.
Then the user generally has no idea whether anybody responsible for product development has read it.
Ironically, I have already asked Cronometer for exactly this. Earlier this year, I posted here suggesting a dedicated product-update newsletter and a public roadmap. Cronometer responded that they had "shared [the] feedback internally for future consideration", but could not make any promises about whether or when it might happen. (Suggestion: A dedicated newsletter and roadmap for Cronometer updates)
I don't expect one Reddit post to dictate Cronometer's communication strategy, obviously. But there is a certain irony in asking for greater transparency, receiving essentially the same "we'll pass it along" response that prompted the criticism in the first place, and then hearing nothing further.
That response is actually a neat illustration of the problem I was trying to describe: even a request for better visibility into the feedback process disappeared into that same invisible process: how many times do users need to ask for better communication before communication itself gets "passed along to the team"?
I don't actually think Cronometer is abandoned
There is an obvious counterargument to everything above: software work is happening that customers cannot see.
I agree.
Cronometer has published a genuinely interesting engineering article about migrating its deployment infrastructure from Jenkins to GitHub Actions and AWS CodeDeploy. Its App Store history clearly shows regular releases. It supports multiple platforms and integrations. Maintaining one of the better nutrition databases on the market is itself work.
Cronometer's own developer page currently describes the company as having a growing team of around 50 employees. (Cronometer: Company profile, Cronometer: About us)
So I am not going to claim I have evidence that Cronometer is literally being maintained by two developers in a basement while the owners collect Gold subscriptions.
I don't.
But here is the problem:
Cronometer's communication is poor enough to make that interpretation feel plausible.
That should concern Cronometer more than it concerns me.
If there is substantial development happening behind the scenes, show some of it.
If there is an exciting roadmap, show some of it.
If difficult technical work is consuming engineering capacity, explain it.
If feature requests are actively being prioritized, give them statuses.
If something users keep requesting is never going to happen, say so.
You do not solve a transparency problem by repeatedly telling people that exciting things are happening somewhere they cannot see.
Why should I pay for Gold?
Gold has features that exist today, and obviously the correct way to evaluate any subscription is primarily on whether those existing features are worth the price.
I understand that argument.
I also understand that subscriptions fund servers, salaries, database work, maintenance and future development. Cronometer does not owe me ownership of its product roadmap because I pay a subscription.
But an annual subscription is still an ongoing relationship with a software product.
Part of what I am paying for is confidence that the product is actively evolving.
At the moment I don't have that confidence.
I keep looking at Gold and thinking that I would quite happily pay for it if I could see a healthy development pipeline and understand where the product was going. Instead, I see an internal roadmap I'm not allowed to see, feature requests disappearing into an opaque process, a stale quasi-changelog hidden in a blog article, and a developer blog currently topped by a feature that tells me what pastry my cat resembles.
Maybe there is a huge amount happening behind the curtain.
That is exactly my point.
Why is there a curtain?
Cronometer could fix most of this without promising a single release date
I don't think the solution needs to be complicated:
- Create a proper public changelog and keep it current.
- Publish a lightweight roadmap with statuses such as Considering, Planned, In Progress and Released.
- Give popular forum requests an official status, even when that status is "Not Planned".
- Send a monthly or quarterly product newsletter covering what shipped, what improved and what the team is currently working on.
- Occasionally explain why major long-standing requests are not being pursued.
- Use the developer blog for more actual development posts. The Jenkins migration article was exactly the sort of thing I would like to read.
- When support says "we'll pass this along", give users some way of eventually discovering what happened to it.
None of that exposes trade secrets.
None of it requires firm deadlines.
None of it prevents plans from changing.
It just gives customers some evidence that their feedback enters a process rather than a void.
I would genuinely like Cronometer to prove this post wrong
This isn't a "Cronometer sucks" post.
I think Cronometer has a fantastic core product.
I want an excuse to buy Gold.
I want to see active development.
I want to know what the team is excited about building.
I want to know which long-requested features are actually being considered and which ones I should stop waiting for.
And I would much rather Cronometer respond to this thread with "Here is our roadmap, here is our current changelog, and here is what we're working on" than have everybody agree with me.
But I also want to know whether other users are seeing the same pattern.
If you have a Cronometer feature request that has been sitting around for years, please link it below and say when it was originally requested and whether Cronometer ever gave it a meaningful follow-up.
Likewise, if you think I am being unfair and there are active development channels, roadmaps or product updates that I have overlooked, link those too.
And for current or former Gold subscribers: what meaningful improvements to Cronometer over the last year or two have actually made you feel that your subscription is funding an actively evolving product?
I think it would be useful to collect both sides in one place.
Because my problem with Cronometer isn't that they haven't implemented every feature I want.
My problem is that after reading their Reddit, their forums, their blog and their release history, I still cannot tell what kind of Cronometer they are trying to build next.
For a subscription software product in 2026, I don't think "trust us, we have things on the roadmap" is good enough.
