Choosing the right pregnancy tracker app for you is surprisingly difficult. Usually, you start using the tracker months before you start telling people you’re pregnant, so you can’t always just ask friends for advice as you might for a phone, or match-three game, or other non-emotionally-loaded app or device. Here is why (and how) we chose the app ‘Preglife’, despite the hideous name, and whether or not it’s good.
Picking the right pregnancy tracker
First up, it is really weird that the built-in health apps on your phone don’t include a pregnancy tracker. I guess it’s like a dog chasing a car? They know how to track the cycles of your uterus, but don’t know what to do when your actually pregnant. It’s only fairly recently that they started adding “I’m pregnant” buttons and I still haven’t spotted a “hysterectomy” button for those trackers.
There are a lot of things to consider when picking a pregnancy app:
- Privacy – this is really the big one. There is a lot of money in your data, and there is even more money in selling you random items for your baby. (More on this in a sec.)
- You need to find one that gives you the right information – we wanted an easy way to track the weeks and days of the pregnancy, get information on what the baby was up to as it all progressed, get size comparisons, and get tips on what we should expect each week. But you might have different priorities.
- Making sure the vibe is right – the sheer cutesiness of some of these apps hurts my very soul and those weren’t for me. If I have to read one more thing about “my journey to meet my little one” or “embracing your inner warrior”, I will throw up. But, at the same time, there is nothing wrong with those kinds of apps if that’s your jam. We all like our information presented differently, and I think that’s beautiful.
Privacy was really the most important thing for me when looking for a pregnancy app, which is why we settled for one that wasn’t ideal. My wife and I had been trying IVF on-and-off for almost eight years before this pregnancy. While I haven’t been shy about any of that (I wrote about it in columns for two major newspapers, lol), the fear of the pregnancy failing and then being stuck with every tracker on the internet constantly serving us pictures of cute babies trying to sell us things was strong. The internet data business is good at capitalising on your life to sell you things, it’s not good about being respectful of grief.
There’s also the issue that some places will arrest you for miscarrying. This is especially a problem in the US (a place I visit frequently), but also in other countries that don’t value or respect bodily autonomy.
We read through guides like this one from Choice and looked at the Mozilla Privacy Not Included site to see which apps had the least bad privacy agreements. As you can see from those guides, there aren’t really any specific pregnancy tracker apps that are good. There is almost no such thing as full privacy when it comes to apps, so you need to balance whether it’s worth it for you.
We chose the Sweden-based Preglife Pregnancy App from those lists because it didn’t force us to make an account (so when we delete the app, the data from it is also gone), the privacy policy was good, and the information it requested was minimal. Even after downloading and using the app, my Google and Facebook ads did not change from just being about bikes, which is always a good sign.
What’s good about Preglife Pregnancy App?
Aside from the privacy stuff listed above, I like how straightforward the app is. There is a big display of how many weeks and days along you are, alongside counters of roughly how many days left until you pop, and what how far along you are in the pregnancy measured by percentage (presumably to appeal to gamers).
Then below that there are things you can tap to read about what the baby’s up to this week, what the “mother” can expect to be feeling, and then some nonsense for the partner about how you should act like a decent human being towards the mother who is really going through it.
I particularly like the part that compares the size of your baby to various fruits and vegetables. Each week you can tap on a picture of a present to get a new size estimate. Though, the further along this gets, the more I doubt whether the makers of this app have seen fruits and vegetables before. Last week the baby was 14cm long, and supposedly the size of a kiwi fruit. Does Sweden have oddly sized kiwi fruit? This week the kid is 16cm, and the size of a lemon. Like, I get that fruit and veg sizes are variable, and babies are baby-shaped and thus probably not fruit-shaped, but there are some odd choices. The fruit and veg scale also seems to be different depending on which website you visit, and I think that shows the beauty and diversity of international fruit sizes.
There are also articles and checklists in the app, and none of them seem to be trying to sell me anything. I would recommend reading more Australian-specific (or whichever country you’re in) articles and books, as they will be more specific for your situation, but it’s a nice touch.
I really like that all the things you can track (aside from due date) are optional. You can track your weight, but you don’t have to, and the option isn’t high up in the menu for people who might find that confronting.
Overall, it’s mostly interesting information, presented in a way that’s easy to read, complete with oddly creepy videos of foetuses at various stages.
What isn’t good about the Preglife Pregnancy App?
You mean, aside from that utterly cringeworthy name? It makes a lot of assumptions about the people involved in this pregnancy, which won’t be ideal for a lot of families.
For a start, it aggressively genders the pregnant person at every step and assumes they’re the mother. Sure, a pregnant person who has downloaded a pregnancy app will usually be a woman and eventually be a mother, but there are so many options. The pregnant person could be non-binary, a trans man, intersex (and identify with a different gender), or not be the mother of the baby. It’s not just wanted pregnancies that are tracked, and surrogacy is also a lot more common these days than it used to be. It would be really nice to have a drop-down menu in the settings where you can select pronouns and whether the pregnant person is comfortable being labelled as a mother.
I do appreciate that most of the time the partner is labelled as partner/co-parent, and not father. Though articles and other sections for the “partner” do often end up defaulting back to father at some point or another.
This isn’t great in 2023. My baby does not have a father, they have two mums. There are also plenty of pregnant people who are single by choice, or are acting as a surrogate, or intend to adopt out the baby when they’re born. This is another part where options would make different families feel more included.
There are a lot of things that can make you feel othered when you’re having kids as part of something other than a traditional nuclear family. Given how easy it would be to make apps like this more welcoming, it seems unnecessary that this should be one of those othering things.
Other than that, I would like to give the video scripts and articles a punchy rewrite. The information is good, it’s just not presented as well as it could be. But given that this app wasn’t originally created for an English-speaking audience, this is an incredibly minor complaint.
Final thoughts
All up, Preglife Pregnancy App isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough when most of the other pregnancy apps I could find information on were significantly worse. But there really is a gap in the market for a queer-friendly pregnancy tracking app that respects your privacy.