XDA’s own Randy Westergren has been known to find all sorts of neat little things buried inside the core of some of the most popular apps, and this time he provided us with a modified APK of MyFitnessPal, arguably the most comprehensive fitness app out there. This app has been tweaked to reveal a “Secret Admin Menu” (yes, really) that is just what the name says it is, and it contains some neat information about what’s to come.

 

 

MyFitnessPal boasts 80 million members largely due to its food database of over 5 million items, but despite the massive userbase and work put behind the app, there isn’t a direct monetization model as seen with “premium” offerings. To this day the app is free to use, but it does have advertising that can get in the way of the UX. Some of the more hardcore users wish they could get rid of them by paying a premium fee, but until Under Armour bought the app for $475 million things didn’t look like they’d change.

The modified APK given to us seemingly solves that. The Secret Admin menu can be found in the side-menu of the app, hidden at plain sight at the very bottom. Accessing it reveals a lot of administrator and developer tools as well as debugging options. There’s also a lot of menus for API management, but what’s most alluring is a sub menu labelled “Premium” with two options: Premium Debug and Payment Debug/Diagnostic. The second option crashes the app upon clicking, but the name revealed that the premium features would be under a typical periodic payment model (detailed below).

The Premium Debug option takes you to an entirely new menu, where you have Diagnostics at the top, with some information about the current status relevant to the debugging. The Premium ‘available to user’ bit can be toggled with the Overrides to enable the actual premium features in the application, meaning that we got to check some of them out. That being said, the toggles below spill almost all the beans as to what the features are as well. After unlocking the premium features, a new menu appears showing the payment options as well as a break down of each addition.

 

The optional subscription model might change upon release, but so far the prices detailed in the app are $5.99 for 1 month and $39.99 to $49.99 for one year. We are not sure why there are two one-year options, and tapping on the buttons leads to a very roughly made menu that prompts server error messages. The features detailed in both the promotional section and the debug menu are as follows:

• Priority Customer Support
• Advertisements removal
• Quick Add Macronutrients
• Nutrient Dashboard
• Verified Food Filter
• Macronutrients by Gram
• Exercise Calorie Settings
• Food Analysis
• Premium Graphs

Note that the toggles do not completely correspond to the listed features, and we believe that some of the them are not present in the tested application. We dug around and found many, which we tested to see how they worked, and they seemed almost finished in terms of design and functionality:

The Quick Add function in the default application allows you to quickly input the amount of calories for the entry, and skipping the tedious process of selecting foods to meet the calorie count. The new Quick Add is a replacement that retains the calorie addition, but also allows for a more thorough entry by detailing the amount of carbohydrates, fat and protein. This allows knowledgeable users to save time while still retaining a detailed log.

There are also more detailed graphic displays of calories and macronutrients, with simple pie charts and some information about the total calories, net calories and your goal. The macros also have a pie chart detailing carbohydrates, fat and protein grams and total percentages, as well as your goal percentages. The nutrients menu has progress bars on your nutrition goals, including calories, total fat (broken down as well), sugars, vitamins and proteins, etc. Each section can be tapped to enter another pie chart breaking down the percentages for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks as well as the total grams and goal for any day you chose.

We also found the "Custom Goals", which allow you to have further control over your daily goals by letting to input the desired macronutrient quantities for each day, as well as your calorie intake. By doing this, the application can adjust to your diet better, and not the other way around. We haven't had enough time to fully test this feature, but everything we've seen is functional. One thing to note is that it seemingly doesn't adjust to the suggested routine that the application gives you, so this feature is probably aimed at knowledgeable users.

Finally, we found the feature that gives you the option to increase your daily calorie goal on the days that you work out. For those that want to have further control over the service (and see other gains on top of just burning fat), this could be a very useful addition. You can input a custom percentage as well, if you are knowledgeable, to have better control over your macronutrient intake.

So there you have it. We found no details about when the Premium features would release, and the listed prices might not be final. There might also be additional premium features on the way, and we didn't get to try all of them. The ones we saw worked rather well, and they have good value for those who want to have a more personal routine. The biggest selling point for many, though, will probably be the removal of all ads (which also worked in the tested application). Considering how big My Fitness Pal is, this could become a rather successful operation.

Do you use MyFitnessPal or other fitness applications? Would these features benefit you? Let us know below!