A court approved a settlement this year over how Flo handled the most private information its users ever typed into a phone. If you use Flo and somehow missed the news, here is the short version. The Federal Trade Commission reached an earlier settlement with Flo Health over claims that the app shared sensitive health…
Anonymized does not mean untraceable. It just means your name got removed before your information started traveling. Most pregnancy apps collect far more than a due date and a weight entry. They log sleep patterns, search terms inside the app, time of day you open it, what screen you lingered on, and sometimes your approximate…
Somewhere along the way, nearly every app decided that a one time purchase was not enough, that the only sustainable business was a subscription renewing quietly in the background for as long as it could go unnoticed by the person paying it. We decided the opposite, on purpose, from the very first version of Zorya,…
You always think you will remember the question. You never do, not by the time you are sitting in the appointment with fifteen minutes on the clock and a dozen other things suddenly feeling more urgent to bring up first. That is the entire reason the note log exists inside Zorya. It is a plain,…
At some point, almost everyone finds themselves reading a pregnancy update written by somebody else and quietly measuring their own week against it, usually without meaning to and often without even noticing it is happening until the feeling has already landed. Maybe it is a friend whose bump looks smaller at the same number of…
Every app on your phone is fighting for a few extra seconds of your attention, and pregnancy apps are not exempt from that fight, whatever the warm tone of their marketing might suggest about their intentions. Ovia has built a genuinely useful set of tools over the years, and plenty of people track their whole…
Somewhere between typing your last period date and closing the app, a piece of software may be watching every tap you make, and not in the way you would expect. A few years back, researchers found that a number of popular apps, including some aimed at new and expecting parents, had quietly embedded session replay…
There is no team meeting behind Zorya, no product roadmap debated across six departments, no growth team deciding which notification might lift engagement by two percent this quarter. There is my husband Tomislav and me, working from the same table most days, building something we actually needed ourselves and could not find anywhere else on…
Counting kicks sounds simple until you are actually sitting there trying to remember whether that last flutter counted as one movement or a continuation of the last one, and whether you already lost count somewhere in the middle. Fetal movement counting is one of the oldest and most useful habits in pregnancy, and it has…
Nobody warns you properly about the sharp little stab on one side of your belly that shows up out of nowhere around the second trimester, usually right when you stand up too fast or roll over in bed at an awkward angle. That sensation has a name, round ligament pain, and it is one of…