I've been a vegetarian for 15 years, and while it has its ups and downs, I'm happy with that choice.

Eating processed foods that lack proper nutrition is a constant battle for me, partly because it is easy to grab ready-made vegetarian packaged foods at the store.

That's when I thought: Why not use my trusty Android phone to guide me toward a healthier lifestyle through my eating habits? There's bound to be an app out there that is useful.

I tried three vegetarian/vegan-friendly apps; they all had pros and cons, but one became my favorite.

My vegetarian app selection and why I chose it

Plenty of apps to pick from

No app is perfect, but if one helps a little, it wins.

I want an app that can do one of two things: guide me on what foods to buy and help me understand nutrition.

Additionally, something that can help me track my nutrition and maybe plan my meals.

I ran into trouble finding good apps because many are geared toward newer vegetarians and vegans, while others focus on tracking vegetarian or vegan-friendly restaurants.

I also chose apps that didn't ask for much personal information before I saw anything inside the app — for example, I originally had the ProVeg Veggie Challenge as the fourth app on my list, but it locked me out until I provided my email. That didn't sit well with me.

I am fine providing some information because many of these health apps require you to create an account to profile you properly, which I had to do with one of the apps I've tried on this list.

But if I cannot preview the core features or get into the app, I am not going to sign up for it.

As such, the three apps that I installed are:

• Vegan & vegetarian - VegUp

Open Food Facts is the most trustworthy on this list because it is open source, and you can inspect the code yourself.

The app relies heavily on crowdsourcing for its information, which I find interesting, and one of my preferred bargain deal apps is similar.

Crowdsourcing has its cons, which I'll cover more in the next section.

I found the other two by browsing the Google Play Store.

My experience with these vegetarian apps

I have one favorite among them

Credit: Grendelkhan / Wikimedia Commons

At a glance, I was most excited to try the first app, Vegan & vegetarian - VegUp. It lets you track nutrition by logging the foods you eat, and everything you enter gives you a VegUp score.

Ideally, you want a good distribution across categories, and you should focus on your favorite nutrients (your deficiencies, which you can customize).

The higher the scores, the more nutrients you are getting, and each value is weighted based on how much a healthy person should consume. So loading up on proteins and fibers won't necessarily net you a higher number.

You can do this by nutrient or by day, but either method requires you to basically input a food diary — which, to me, is sometimes exhausting to do.

I wouldn't have an issue if I didn't have a harder time tracking the foods I eat. Since I haven't eliminated processed foods from my diet, I have no way to track them.

Your recipe or food product must be in the database; otherwise, the app encourages you to create it.

Creating a new one requires a barcode scan, manual food entry, or a custom recipe.

I am happy to scan barcodes, but I dread adding anything manually since it is quite detailed.

The app is thorough, but I have to be real with the time I have between trying to make home-cooked recipes and being careful with the items I buy from the store — I don't want all my time to go into one app — though I think it is still useful to keep on the back burner after I get a consistent meal plan going.

However, the pros of using the Vegan & Vegetarian - VegUp app are in the section.

The FAQ has useful information that I recommend reading at least once if you're a new vegan/vegetarian.

Plus, according to their official site, it mentions that:

So the numbers you see in the app should be trustworthy.

The second app I used was Open Food Facts. Now this one makes me sad.

I really like the idea of crowdsourced information because it provides real-world context of products you'd find at a grocery store.

I tried using Gemini to find suggested fiber-rich crackers in Canada; some were crazy expensive, and I had to order them off Amazon (third-party sellers), and other brands simply didn't exist.

But the problem is that I am from Canada. Apparently, the app doesn't recognize the products I buy in its database, and I need to see them to calculate the Nutri-Score.

I even checked if my favorite Quaker brand was among them, Quaker Chewy, and I couldn't find a match in the section (it also loads a bit slowly sometimes).

Quaker is a globally recognized brand, so thankfully other products were listed, but not the ones I want since I buy the low-sugar double cocoa kind.

So I thought it was fine to do my due diligence by adding the product to the database — I scanned the barcode, but I still had to fill out a bunch of information — and that also required an account.

Repeatedly, I had to do this for more items in my pantry, and I felt fatigued. So I begrudgingly accepted it; the app just isn't for me.

The last app I used is The Vegan App. This topped as my favorite.

It turns out I liked Avi, the AI chatbot, a lot —I tested its responses against what I knew about Beyond Meat.

It did factually well. Plus, the app offers other features, like scanning items in my fridge and pantry to suggest meals.

The app is also simple, and the interface is clean. It's just not perfect because AI can get it wrong (it can hallucinate information), but so far, in my last week and a half of testing, it hasn't done a poor job.

To AI with your food apps or not to AI

Avi swayed my vote for my favorite vegetarian app so far.

Maybe part of that favoritism is that I find it more interactive, and it makes navigating the app's core features less cumbersome.

As much as I thought I'd want manual entry, I realized the process is a bit too tedious.

I may also cross-check with Gemini (via Gems) and Circle to Search in the future.