What’s worse is that most of them are, to put it bluntly, dogs. Even the best of them don’t adequately address the problem they claim to solve. Which begs the question: Are we ready to prescribe them to our clients? I mean, are these apps actually helpful? For most apps, the answer seems to be “not likely” or “possibly,” respectively.Īpps are neither wanted by the bulk of us nor are they fully functional. So many, in fact, that they’re hard to filter through. Moreover, it’s clear from a simple app store survey that animal health apps are on the rise. Here’s another eye-opener: An estimated 500 million people worldwide had used a health app by 2015. In fact, at least 50,000 apps are categorized as “health and fitness” or “medical” in the iTunes store alone. We’ve become adept at using apps to track our own various health metrics, such as weight, calories ingested, exercise undertaken and blood glucose. It’s really difficult to design a useful app when you don’t have complete control of the process.Įven the most useful app was no match for our culture’s app proficiency circa 2011.įast forward to 2016 and the once-bare terrain has been completely landscaped, or at least resod. Mostly, I learned that independent developers cannot be trusted, but also: Though I still maintain a defunct Twitter feed for my outdated and very expensive bit of software, I learned a lot about building and maintaining an app. I was an early designer of one such health care monitoring app, The Fat Dog Diet. Like it or not-and I happen to know many of us do not-that means our clients’ use of apps to track their pets can’t be far behind.įor better and worse, I know a lot about apps. Our clients increasingly use health apps on their mobile devices to monitor their own health and fitness.

Pet weight tracker app