I’ve been using this app for about six weeks, consistently tracking my symptoms and meals. I will say that with a low (5-15/day) FP diet, my heartburn symptoms (burning sensation) have been eliminated, other symptoms have slightly reduced or stayed the same. As far as the app, it is useful for adding symptoms, noting your meals, and tracking overtime with the graph, however it is very glitchy, which frequently which makes it frustrating to use. For example, the buttons in general do not see very responsive, and either they are slow or have to be tapped multiple times to get them to do what they’re supposed to do (both the meal type/ symptom button page and the individual food items and symptoms); and many times when I hit the back button, the app closes all together. Also, when entering a new meal, almost invariably the very first item I enter ends up on the previous meal rather than the new meal that I’m entering, so I constantly have to double check what I’m entering and verify the meals after they’ve been entered. In addition to having the glitches fixed, the app could definitely use some other practical updates as other users have pointed out, but the glitches are the main reason for the reduced stars in this review.

I read the book and wanted to try this method of controlling GERD, but the app is horrendous. I read the reviews before getting it and expected that it wouldn’t have many foods, but dude, it seriously has almost nothing, and even trying to search for foods is ridiculous. Unless you type something in the search box that exactly matches how a food is entered, it doesn’t come up. For example, I tried searching for “shredded coconut” by typing “coconut” and then “shredded” and nothing came up. Then I tried “shredded” and “coconut” and nothing came up. Shredded coconut is on his FP food list given in the book, so there’s absolutely no reason it shouldn’t be in here. I even tried using it in conjunction with MyFitnessPal since they have pretty much everything, but you can’t track the right macros in MFP (i.e., there is no FP) and it would take forever to add all of the foods individually to the FTD app, all the while having to guess at the FP for each item. It’s an interesting concept, but man, it needs a lot of work before it can easily be applied. I don’t have the time to do all of this all on my own, and I figured that spending money on the book and the app would get me a lot more information than it has. The author has outlined some interesting ideas, but the implementation is too difficult so it’s not of much use. I really wanted to try this as a way of controlling my symptoms without medication, but this is not helpful at all.

If you are following a low fermentation potential diet, this is very helpful, but not perfect. When I create custom recipes, I will often look back at my recipes to find that oddly items have been swapped out. This happened multiple times so I ended up editing the recipe to list an entirely different ingredient and that seemed to fix it but it made my recipes inaccurate. Also, sometimes when I’m on a certain day, which I’ve double checked, I go to add a food, and it puts it on the previous day. Then I have to edit it, and it goes in the right place but there’s just a variety of glitchy things like this. A couple of times I’ve added “sucrose (table sugar)” to a recipe and looked later and it said “splenda.” of course, that could’ve been an error on my end but then I would redo it and come back and find the same weird glitch! Also, I would love it if there was someway to export a tab delineated / spreadsheet document of some kind for me to have a better view of my trends and symptoms, etc.

I have found this app to be very useful, but the following improvements would be nice:1. Sync between devices2. Ability to add multiple items at a time when tracking food3. Expansion of the general library of foods for which FP have been calculated. Perhaps by crowdsourcing and allowing users to add to the library each time the calculator is used and a custom item is saved. If there are concerns about a calculation being unverified, those particular items could be in a different color to warn users. 4. Category lists available in alphabetical order, not just by ascending FP amounts. While there is an overall alphabetical listing provided, it would still be helpful to have this feature by category when planning menus and trying to make sure all food groups are included. 5. Integration of Glycemic Index lists for easier calculations. Or, at the very least, links to acceptable lists, so users don't need to go out of the app to look these items up. 6. Inclusion of caloric amounts for food items, as many users are also concerned about their caloric intake.7. Inclusion of recipes that are in the book and ability to add them when tracking food, so users don't have to add each ingredient individually.