What Happened to the Flaredown App? (And Where to Track Now)

By Andre Minoli

Short answer, for anyone who searched “what happened to Flaredown” mid-flare and just needs to know: the Flaredown app is gone from both the App Store and Google Play, the website hasn’t been updated since January 2021, and while the free web app still works — we made an account and logged check-ins in August 2026 — it is visibly running without maintenance: save errors, pages that fail to load, a © 2017 footer. It’s alive, but it’s coasting. If you rely on it, export your data regularly.

But “dead app” is not the real story, and Flaredown deserves better than that summary. First, the disclosure you should expect from a post like this: we make Flare - Chronic Pain Tracker, an iPhone symptom tracker — which makes us a competitor. Read with that in mind.

What Flaredown was

Flaredown launched in 2014, crowdfunded by patients, built for people with autoimmune and invisible illnesses. It was free — not free-with-a-catch, just free — and it got several things right that most health apps still get wrong a decade later.

It let you define your own conditions, symptoms, and treatments in your own words, instead of forcing you into a fixed checklist. It rated severity on a coarse 0–4 scale rather than the false precision of 0–10 — a choice we’ve written about before, and one we arrived at ourselves years later. It logged weather automatically alongside your symptoms. And it had a community: a chat where people tracking the same conditions could actually find each other.

It went further than almost anyone on openness, too. The code was published on GitHub, and the team released an anonymized research dataset on Kaggle that data scientists still cite and explore. For a patient-built, unfunded project, that’s a remarkable legacy.

What actually happened

From the outside, the record reads like this: the native iPhone and Android apps stopped being updated around 2016–2017, and both have since been removed from the app stores entirely. The marketing site — which still advertises them — was last modified in January 2021, around the same time an “offline notice” appeared in its code. The web app footer still says © 2017.

What kept it from disappearing altogether is quietly wonderful: volunteers. The web app’s code lives with Ruby for Good, a volunteer open-source collective, and it was still receiving maintenance commits as recently as this month. Nobody is building new features, but someone is keeping the lights on — most likely so that the people who already depend on it don’t lose access.

That’s not a scandal. It’s the ordinary, sad arithmetic of patient-built software: one founder, no funding, a service that costs real money and energy to run — energy that chronic illness itself has a way of taxing. Flaredown didn’t fail its users. It just ran out of hands.

What it’s like to use in 2026

We made an account in August 2026 to see for ourselves. The heart of it still beats, and it’s still thoughtful: you pick your conditions from a search box that shows how many other users track each one — a quiet community touch we haven’t seen anywhere else — and check in on a five-step scale that runs from a smiling “not active” face to “very active.” Custom conditions, in your own words, exactly as promised.

The seams show everywhere else. In one short session we hit “Checkin save failed!” errors, pages that only loaded after a refresh, and rendering glitches throughout. None of it destroyed data as far as we could tell; all of it is the ordinary friction of software running years past its last real update. If you go in knowing that, it may still serve you. Just don’t build years of history on it without backups.

If you have a Flaredown account

Log in while you can, and export your history — CSV export was a built-in feature. Even if you never open the file, months or years of symptom history is exactly the kind of evidence worth bringing to a doctor, and it’s yours. Whatever you move to next — another app, a spreadsheet, paper — the habit transfers; the data doesn’t unless you take it.

What to look for in a replacement

The fairest tribute to Flaredown is to use its design as the checklist, and then add the lessons of its ending:

• Your symptoms, your words. If an app hands you a fixed symptom list, it isn’t tracking your illness.
• A coarse severity scale. Five levels you can use consistently beat eleven you can’t.
• Context logged with symptoms — weather, stress, activity — because triggers hide in context.
• Active maintenance. Check when the app was last updated before you invest months of daily entries in it.
• Data export, anytime. The ending of any app should cost you nothing but the app.

Where Flare fits — and where it doesn’t

Flare is our attempt at that checklist: custom symptoms in your own terms, five named severity levels, weather tracked alongside your entries (on Apple’s own weather service), and PDF reports built for appointments. It’s actively developed, needs no account, and your data stays on your device.

It’s also not Flaredown, and honesty requires saying so: Flare is iPhone-only today (Android is coming), it has no community features — it’s a private diary, not a place to find people like you — and while tracking is free, exports are part of the paid tier. If a community was what Flaredown meant to you, a condition-specific forum or subreddit paired with any good tracker may serve you better than any single app can.

If Bearable is the other app on your shortlist — for Flaredown users it usually is — we’ve compared Bearable and Flare directly, including the cases where Bearable is the better answer.

If you spot something here that’s out of date — especially if you know more about Flaredown’s current state than we could verify from the outside — tell us and we’ll correct it. That’s what we’d want, and it’s what its builders deserve.

Flare - Chronic Pain Tracker is a symptom-tracking tool, not a medical device. This article is general information, not medical advice — talk to your doctor about decisions affecting your health.