Snap and Eat is a food image recognition application which is tied up with a campaign from Health Promotion Board to promote eating healthy. User can earn point for the campaign to get rewards.
Summary of the presentation
Malfunction of main feature
The main features which is the food image recognition is not even working properly. Although there is still the barcode scanning, the food database is too small and it often doesn’t have any match. Most of the time, the user has to key in the food’s nutrition which is quite a hassle.
Poor UI and maintenance
This app has poor UI and maintenance as presented, the most obvious 1 is the blue sub header is much bigger than the orange main header. The bottom navigation bar also has too many options, which require the user to scroll. There is even broken UI like miskicking of buttons and scrollable contents that can’t be scrolled. Although the Health Promotion Board event has ended, the event is still visible in the app and this shows that the developer has abandoned the app.
Business Limitations
This app is tied to Health Promotion Board whose primary goal is not to make profit but to promote their campaign and it is very unlikely that they will use ads to monetize the app. Even if we consider this app without the HPB, there will even be less user as there are tons of competitors like which has way more accurate food recognition.
Personal Opinion
Personally, I think it is a very useful app especially for people that are obsessed with tracking calories like bodybuilders or someone who is trying to lose weight. Tracking calories is always a hassle especially when you have to look up the nutrition info of every food u eat or even weigh the food. This app solves this problem and allows the user to snap the food they eat and automatically calculate its nutrient. Then the user can even see the total calorie intake for the day and determine if it meets their goal. It is the perfect idea for that solves the problem.
However, after downloading the app and tried it for myself, the food recognition is very bad and almost never work at all even on obvious fruits like banana and apple. Even the barcode does not work all the time as their database is quite small. So, there is actually no use for this app since it can’t solve the problem that it was created for. The user still has to write down the nutrition and this app just serve as a log to record the food intake.
The only upside I can think of is the camera button to take a snap of the food is pretty flashed out and obvious to the user.
In conclusion, I won’t even recommend this app to any of my friends as there are better alternative solution like foodai which has a robust food image recognition.