What are the best pregnancy apps?

Not many folks know this yet, but my wife and I are expecting our first child! We’re beyond excited for the adventures, lessons, and tribulations that lie ahead for us. It also is a great opportunity to delve into a whole new genre of apps I’d previously left unexplored. Of course, I’m talking about pregnancy apps. Here are some my wife and I have found useful thus far or will be using in the future. 

What to Expect
A Modernized Oldie

Anyone else’s parents still have one of these old books lying around the house? My mom even was looking to dig up her copy to gift us, but this app is much better replacement for us. It is full of information, articles, guides, and advice for your baby’s journey.

The app has an award-winning calculator that will help you identify your baby’s due date. Then you’ll receive updates daily and weekly on the progress your baby is making. You’ll see how large your baby is and how much they weigh. It will then be compared to common items such as a grapefruit or pomegranate. My wife especially loves that it will compare your upcoming bundle of joy to objects from 80’s and 90’s pop culture. In our journey, the app has compared out baby to the Barbasol shaving cream can from Jurassic Park and old Sega gaming consoles.

Beyond that, the app is a wealth of helpful knowledge that can easily be searched. Information also is conveyed via videos which some may prefer over oodles of reading. You’ll learn what parts of your baby is growing and how your body changes. The development cycle is fascinating and allows you and your partner to follow along together. We aren’t ones for community forums, but if you are, What to Expect has that as well. Other parents who are at similar stages can chat together about their shared experiences.

This app is extremely full-featured and has a wonderful UI that easy to navigate. It is very popular for a reason and the developers have put quite a bit of work into polishing this pregnancy mainstay for the modern age. 

Apple Fitness
Stay fit before and after

Keeping yourself healthy before and after you have your kiddo is incredibly important. It can aid your recovery, help your mood, can make giving birth easier, and is overall better for the baby. Finding workouts that are suitable for your stage in your pregnancy can be difficult, though there are multiple resources out there. What my wife has found most useful though, is Apple’s own Fitness+ app.

The Apple Fitness app is one of our favorites. It is full of guided classes for cycling bikes, treadmills, strength training, dance, HITT, and more. Recently, Apple has continue to grow its offerings by catering several classes for those during pregnancy.

You’re able to access Apple Fitness+ classes across your iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. It will automatically connect to your Apple Watch to display your rings and heart rate on-screen as you complete your workouts. It is a fantastic example of how Apple’s various services and pieces of hardware can all work in tandem.

During these pregnancy-focused workouts your three instructors will all demonstrate the workout steps. Each of the instructors will show modifications that are tailored to your first, second, and third trimesters. You can follow whichever modifications fit your current timeframe or whichever you’re most comfortable with.

We both workout regularly with Apple Fitness+ and now that there are pregnancy workouts, it’s even more beneficial — and safer — for an increasingly large audience. 

WebMD Pregnancy
Your go-to reference library

If you’ve stayed up to date with my apps of the week, you may remember me covering the standard WebMD app in the past. It’s a frequently used web resource — perhaps sometimes over used at times — but here I’m talking about the niche WebMD Pregnancy. This app is very similar to the original, but tailored to those on their nine-month journey.

WebMD has employed a reliable framework to skin and fill the app with different sets of data. That is what allows us to have the normal WebMD, WebMD Pregnancy, WebMD Baby, and WebMD Symptom Checker.

The app employs a familiar bottom tabbar with clean custom lineicons. Your Home tab gives you updates on the status of your baby. This is similar to the What to Expect app I covered above. Then you have a massive A to Z reference library full of any thing you could ever want to know about your baby.

I found the Tools tab to be exceptionally useful. There are many unique features to help you on your journey. You can track belly photos, save articles, view any doctor appointments, measure your contractions, and even count kicks. 

HiMommy
Not just another baby tracker

Pretty much all of these apps offer some sort of ability to see how big the mini is while they’re growing inside. It’s super cool and everyone loves to post that their kiddo is the size of a pineapple on social media. HiMommy does this, and much more, but it does so with one of the most well-designed interfaces I’ve come across.

If you spend as much time as I do examining apps, you start to notice familiar UI elements. Ones that can make an app feel more stock or native but can often be overused. At times, they can be quicker to develop. Take the stock code, adjust some hex values and drop in some custom icon work and you’ve got yourself a stock app. HiMommy feels entirely custom.

There are arcs and interactive charts and graphs throughout the app. Unique animations and timelines that feel developed solely for use in this app. There’s plenty of soft colors that create an impeccably finished app. It ties into native iOS frameworks but comes across as impressively polished.

HiMommy is home to lots of information about your mini, including its size, what is forming during that timeframe, and what it looks like. This tracking goes throughout the first year of your baby’s life. But it isn’t just about baby. You can track your own weight gain and compare it to the suggested weight on a visual chart. There’s options as well for your to log into a pregnancy diary or share your moods and nutrition. 

The Big Daddy
Finally, a pregnancy tracker for dads

Why should the mothers get to have all the fun?! Sure, it’s nice to know when the baby is the size of a acorn squash but why not an app tailored for dads! Turns out, Christopher Deutsch already had this idea with The Big Daddy.

This app has much of the information presented in other apps but tailored to fathers. For example, you can see that by week 32 your little one is the same weight as a roasted chicken. Each of these updates comes with some great custom artwork that is very clean and modern.

Coupled with these updates is a description of the week’s growth and much more tailored to men than women. There’s less flowery language and instead comparisons of your little one to the size of the average human testicle. Will this be for everyone? Nope! But that’s why I love the variability in these apps.

It shouldn’t be up to the woman to know everything about the pregnancy, which is why I found the articles so helpful. Each article is original to the app and doctor-approved. It can be an explanation on the stages of labor or what complications to look out for. 

The Bump
Visualize and learn about baby

What a cool app! Seriously, The Bump is such a neat application for those during pregnancy. It’s wide-ranging set of features helps you track baby, find helpful products, and visualize what it is at each stage.

It is that last feature that I was most enthralled by in testing out The Bump. The app creates a realistic 3D model of the baby and your body at each stage of the pregnancy. You can interact with it and get up-close and personal to see how your baby is changing. Other apps may have videos, but none allow so much inspection and detail as The Bump does with its 3D model. It is beyond cool to examine your child and learn what they’re going through.

Like many others, The Bump is full of other valuable information. There are daily parenting articles as well as a repository to peruse. These are all easily shareable though social or messaging and can be bookmarked for later reading.

Part of having a baby means you’ll have a growing list of new stuff to buy. If you are having a baby shower, you can create a registry directly in the app. It also provides perks, coupons, and other savings for you to utilize. That, coupled with in-depth reviews of devices, makes shopping much easier.

There’s other great features within The Bump too. you can get help with baby names, see how big baby is, see ideas for designing your nursery. It’s a great app and one that we’ve throughly enjoyed using thus far. 

BabyName
Tinder, but for baby names

Especially early on in our pregnancy as we were feeling each other out, BabyName was very helpful. It pops up virtual card with various baby names on them. You then swipe left to reject or right to OK any name that appears. You know, like Tinder.

As you’re swiping through names, they get compared to what your partner has responded. Any time the two of you match on a name, it alerts you. It is a great way to see what each other is thinking for names while also getting to look at a huge list of possible options.

The app uses a clean matte interface similar to Google’s Material design. There’s some nice iconography as you use the app and pastel blue and pink to denote the gender of each name.

For those who want more options, BabyName gives you the ability to filter the names it suggests. You can choose nationality, celebrity names, hipster names, and more. When looking at a name, you can flip the card over to see the meaning behind it, its origin, and what country uses it most predominantly. 

Baby Story
Track your pregnancy journey

We’ve all seen those social media posts where women will show the progress of their baby bump over time. Could be a Timelapse over the whole nine months or weekly update pics. Baby Story helps with that.

The app is full of amazing graphics that are perfect for sharing your pregnancy updates. There are cool fonts and colors that vary wildly based on your taste. I love the “handwritten” look and this app has just that. You can put multiple photos together into a collage while adding text and other visuals for sharing.

But this app doesn’t stop being useful once baby arrives. You can also use it to document your offsprings first moments. See how they grow over their early months, add a little bunny nose on Easter, or apply filters to make the colors pop. It even has the ability to intelligently remove the background from your baby’s pic to put them someplace more outlandish.

We haven’t had our kid yet but I know I’m going to have to fight the urge to constantly put photos up on social media. But if you post regularly or share with family, an app such as Baby Story can be great to take your pictures to the next level. It’s on par with many of the other photo editing apps I’d recommend but tailored just to your little one. 

But enough about other people's apps.

LET'S TALK ABOUT YOURS