Built by someone who needed it.

Why I built Progress

I’ve been through the cycles a lot of people know: stretches of serious lifting, rounds of weight loss, and a GLP-1 journey. Every time, I took progress photos, and every time I hit the same wall. The photos were framed a little differently each session, a step closer, a slightly different angle, different light, so the change I was working for was hard to see. They sat in my camera roll between screenshots and vacation photos. The apps I tried wanted an account, leaned on ghost overlays I had to line up myself, or felt like they’d been built as an afterthought.

My background is in design, product and engineering, and nothing I tried was as good or as easy as I knew it could be. So I built my own.

What Progress does

Progress does the hard part for you. On-device AI lines up every photo, so weeks of change play back in a single swipe and any two dates compare honestly. Hands-free capture waits until you’re in frame, counts you in and calls each of five poses out loud, so you never touch your phone. You can bring the photos you already have, keep your weight and body fat alongside them, and slide between any two days.

It’s also private by design. Your personal data, your photos, measurements and health data, never leaves your iPhone. There’s no account. We only collect anonymous usage data to improve the app, and you can turn it off in Settings.

What we left out matters too: no streaks, no badges, no social feed, no guilt. Just you, lined up.

About me

I studied Computer Science and Machine Learning at Brown, officially, and healthcare policy, unofficially. I’ve spent my career building consumer products, much of it in healthcare, and I’ve designed and shipped several of my own. I grew up in Austin, Texas. You can find more about my work at oscarnewman.me.

The guides and free tools

Alongside the app, we publish guides and free tools for the questions I kept asking myself: how to take photos that are actually comparable, whether a stall is real or just water, what a body fat range looks like, how to tell if a DEXA change is meaningful. Each one starts from what people genuinely search for and ask, is researched against primary sources, and is built to be the clearest, most useful answer we can make, often with an interactive tool instead of another wall of text. Read how we research, write and build them.

Get in touch

Progress is made by Textual, my studio for building software products. Questions, corrections or ideas are always welcome: reach us through support.