How We Write Our App Listicles
When a site that makes a product ranks that product in its own listicle, you should know exactly how the sausage gets made. Here is ours.
We make LiftProof. We also write listicles on GetHealthyCalculators that compare strength training apps, sometimes including LiftProof in the ranking. That is a structural conflict of interest, and the only way to handle it honestly is to disclose how we evaluate. This essay is that disclosure. Every listicle we publish links back here. If a list ranks LiftProof #1, the criteria that produced that ranking are spelled out below. If LiftProof is mid-pack on another list, the same criteria explain why. We would rather lose a sale than win one by hiding the methodology.
Why this exists. The strength training app market is full of breathless "Top 10" posts written by sites that have never opened the apps. Most of them rank by what generates affiliate revenue. We do not run affiliate links on LiftProof or GetHealthyCalculators, and we are not paid by any competitor we evaluate. We still have a bias — we built one of the apps on every list — so we publish our scoring framework, our audit checks, and our refusal list up front. You can read a listicle from us and decide for yourself whether the ranking is defensible. If you think we got something wrong, write to us at jonathan@liftproof.app and we will look at the data.
How we evaluate. Every listicle declares its scoring criteria in the introduction before the ranked list begins. The criteria differ by list — a "best 5/3/1 trackers" list weighs built-in program support and progression math, while a "best apps for Apple Watch" list weighs Watch coverage and complication breadth. We pick the criteria first, then rank against them. We do not pick LiftProof first and reverse-engineer the criteria to make it win.
Each app on a list gets the same evaluation: actual install, three to five workouts logged through the app, real navigation across every primary surface (today, workouts, progress, settings, paywall). We capture install date, version number, and last-tested date in the listicle. When an app updates substantially, we re-test before the next quarterly review. Apps that we have not personally used do not appear on our lists. That is a higher bar than most listicle sites use and it is why our lists tend to be five to seven apps long rather than the marketing-padded "Top 30" format.
Scoring is not a number. Every app on a list gets a paragraph of honest tradeoff framing: what it is good at, what it is not, who it fits. We do not assign 7.4/10 because that pretends to be more precise than the judgment actually is. Numerical scores get gamed by their own authors. Paragraphs do not — if we wrote a paragraph praising an app and the paragraph reads weak, the praise reads weak.
How we audit ourselves. Three checks run before any listicle ships. First, the inversion test: if LiftProof did not exist, would the ranking still make sense? If swapping LiftProof for a hypothetical "perfect competitor" with the same feature surface would change the ranking, our criteria are gamed. The criteria need to be defensible without LiftProof in the picture. Second, the competitor-fair test: every app we mention gets at least one strength noted. If we cannot honestly say what Hevy is better than us at, we do not have the right to be writing the comparison. Third, the cross-check test: for any list where LiftProof ranks #1, we publish a sister essay on this site that explains the specific feature or trade-off that earns the ranking. That essay has to stand on its own as a claim we can defend. The GHC listicles cross-link to those essays so you can verify the reasoning, not just the conclusion.
What we refuse to do. No affiliate links. No paid placements. No "sponsored" entries dressed up as editorial. No "best for 2026" lists assembled from existing 2025 lists without re-testing — every list we publish carries a "last tested" date for each app. No competitor disparagement: every app on every list has real users who like it for real reasons, and pretending otherwise is the easiest tell that a listicle was written by someone who never opened the apps. No padded lists where eight of the ten entries exist only to make the top two look better.
We also refuse to rank LiftProof #1 on lists where the criteria do not honestly support it. On a "best beginner strength apps" list, Strong has a simpler onboarding flow than we do and we say so. On a "best free tier" list, Hevy has a deeper free tier than we do and we say so. Saying so is the credibility the methodology buys. Sites that rank themselves #1 on every category lose your trust by week three.
Cross-links. The full list of LiftProof listicles on GetHealthyCalculators lives at https://gethealthycalculators.com/blog/best-ios-lifting-apps-2026/, https://gethealthycalculators.com/blog/best-five-three-one-trackers/, https://gethealthycalculators.com/blog/best-rpe-trackers-powerlifting/, https://gethealthycalculators.com/blog/best-lifting-apps-privacy/, and others linked from the GHC blog index. Each one back-links to this essay. If you want to see the specific feature claims behind any LiftProof ranking, the relevant essays live at /blog/why-on-device-only/ for the privacy stance and /blog/whats-missing-from-liftproof-v1/ for the honest gaps. If you have a methodology question we have not answered here, jonathan@liftproof.app is the address — we read everything.