Medela Family - Breast Feeding 4+

Great but room for improvement

Pros: I find this app quite useful especially for tracking feeds and pumping sessions. Tracking approximately how long feeding gaps are, allows me to work towards some kind of routine with the baby. No ads, fantastic. The day overview page is a very good visual guide, it allows you to easily identify patterns.

Cons: The most inconvenient part of this app is that I can’t share live updates/tracking records with dad or other family members’ devices. They constantly rely on me to remind them what time baby was feed, so I’ll often get woken up from my recovery naps to let them know. We lose track of nappy changes as well and we all know how important it is to keep an eye on the number and type of nappies baby produces. Otherwise, the app takes a while to launch, the save button lags a bit and spamming it doesn’t help. You can’t seem to edit the growth chart record if you’ve typed the incorrect number in. The spinning wheels to input numbers take up to much time, a number pad maybe more efficient. The screen change between Track and Stats is rather slow since you have to press many buttons to interchange. Providing the last two stats recorded on the tracking page per category can reduce the need to swap. More visual guides in articles will be handy.

I really want to continue using this app for months to come, so hopefully there will be some improvements made on developing the live stats sharing to other devices.

Helpful but room for improvement

I find it easy to track the basics and I like that the app doesn’t over complicate things by providing too many things to track however I have these suggestions:
- ability to log a time/date stamped note. Eg log a bottle but then it would be good to log 10 mins later if bub vomited. That way you can see in the list view the effect or impact a bottle has had on bub and potentially help mum in drawing patterns.
- add “poonami” to the diaper options. There is a BIG difference between a poo and poonami and it would be helpful to see differentiation.
- on the seven day tab, it would be good to have averages. Eg avg number of wet nappies or avg amount of formula or breast milk. Eg Avg amount of milk pumped and/or avg amount of time spent pumping. This would be really helpful when it comes to meeting with my health care professional who always ask for this high level detail.

Developer Response ,

Hi CassRo65, thank you for your feedback! Your suggestions are very useful for us to better understand what our users need and for that we thank you. Users can currently add notes to every trackings they make so let's say they can add a note to the bottle incase the baby has vomited. However, we can think about ways to make this better for you. Regarding the other 2 suggestions, we already have something planned so stay tuned! Your Medela Family

Just fantastic (with some issues)

Upd 2022: have to take more stars off the app - where did the good version of 5 years ago disappear? Some features are great, I.e. the large start/stop buttons, but stats are absolutely bizarre and all those issues with time, mentioned by others, are driving me nuts! Very glitchy! Please check the WHO stats for weight - they don’t go past 13 weeks and the graph makes no sense…
Upd 2018: height charts still not making any sense, weiht ones do work. The main issue remains syncing with server, every now and then data gets lost and syncing between different devices and platforms is still mostly not working.
Original review: Great app, extremely handy, especially after the last update, simply love it! Makes my hectic juggling of bottle, bf and formula a little less hectic - and having nice personal touches and pretty design only helps. Would be great if it didn't log you out all the time though:)

Developer Response ,

Hi Mmuumi, we are very sorry you had a bad experience with our app. We take every complaint seriously. Please rest assured, our team is working non-stop on the app improvement and testing. Please help us improve our app by giving us more specific feedback at intappsupport@medela.com with screenshots or videos of your issue. Your Medela Family