About
Theo Liang reviews fitness-training apps, the wearables that feed them, and productivity tools. His background is exercise physiology and applied sports science; he favours multi-week wear-testing over first-impression sampling and pays close attention to how an app behaves under sustained real use rather than during a demo.
Areas of expertise
- Fitness and training apps
- Health wearables and integrations
- Productivity software
- Long-term use testing
Bylines at
- Outside (contributor)
- DC Rainmaker (occasional)
- Six Colors (freelance)
Recent reviews
Apple Health Review (2026): The Best Free Health Aggregator on iOS — But It Won't Analyze For You
Apple Health is the free, on-device hub that aggregates data from the Apple Watch, iPhone sensors, and third-party apps on iOS. Its privacy model — on-device storage with end-to-end encrypted sync — is the best of any major aggregator. But it is a passive collector, not an analysis tool: it surfaces trends without interpreting them, it is iOS-only, and the quality of what you see depends entirely on the third-party sources feeding it, which vary widely.
Fitbod Review (2026): Adaptive Workouts That Think About Recovery
Fitbod generates each workout for you, weighting exercise selection by which muscle groups it estimates are still recovering. Across three weeks its recovery-aware programming was the genuine differentiator — it consistently steered volume away from recently hit muscles and toward fresh ones. Limitations: it is subscription-only with no usable free tier, and for experienced lifters running a specific periodized plan the auto-generated sessions can feel generic and over-varied.
Things 3 Review (2026): The Cleanest GTD Task Manager — If You're All-Apple
Things 3 is the most polished task manager we tested — a focused GTD app with the cleanest design and interaction model in the category. Over three weeks of daily use on iPhone and Mac, capture was fast, sync via Things Cloud was flawless, and the structure (Areas, Projects, Today, Upcoming) made review effortless. The catch is its closed nature: it is Apple-only with no Android or web, charges a separate one-time price per platform, and offers no collaboration whatsoever.
Garmin Connect Review (2026): The Deepest Training Data on the Market — and the Most Cluttered App
Garmin Connect is the companion app for Garmin's watches and bike computers, and it offers the deepest training-analysis data we tested: training load, acute-to-chronic balance, VO2max estimates, and full multisport support. With a chest strap it captures heart rate as well as anything consumer. Caveats: VO2max is a model estimate carrying meaningful error, optical wrist HR drifts on intervals, and the app's data firehose and cluttered navigation overwhelm casual users.
Notion Review (2026): The Most Flexible All-in-One Workspace — At a Cost
Notion is the most flexible workspace we tested — a single tool that absorbs notes, docs, wikis, and relational databases. Over three weeks building a real working setup, its database engine and linked views proved genuinely powerful. The trade-offs are real: a steep setup curve, blank-canvas overwhelm for new users, and measurable slowdowns on large workspaces, where page loads on a 3,000+ item database ran 2–4 seconds versus well under one second on small pages.
Strava Review (2026): Still the Best Social Layer for Endurance — If You'll Pay
Strava is the dominant social and discovery layer for running and cycling. Across three weeks of GPS activities its segment leaderboards, route discovery, and feed remain best-in-class for motivation. But the subscription has steadily absorbed features that were once free, and activity accuracy is a property of your wearable, not the app — in our side-by-side runs the GPS distance gap between a phone and a multi-band GPS watch reached 3.8% on tree-covered trails.
Oura Ring Review (2026): The Best Consumer Sleep & Recovery Tracker — If You'll Pay the Subscription
Oura (Ring Gen3 / Gen4 + app) is the most useful consumer sleep-and-recovery wearable we tested over six weeks. Against an at-home polysomnography reference, four-stage sleep agreement sat in the ~60–80% range typical of consumer devices — good for a wrist-free ring, not clinical. Its readiness score tracks recovery sensibly across multi-week use. Main drawbacks: a mandatory ongoing membership and a ring form-factor with no screen and no real-time workout metrics.
Strong Review (2026): The Fastest Barbell Logger We Tested
Strong is a no-nonsense strength-training logger. Across three weeks of barbell and dumbbell sessions it was the fastest app we tested to record a set — a median 2.1s (range 1.6–3.0s) from tapping a logged set to being ready for the next — and its plate-math, rest timer, and 1RM trend charts are genuinely useful. Limitations: cardio and conditioning tracking are an afterthought, true programming/periodization is thin, and the free tier caps you at three custom routines.
Todoist Review (2026): The Most Reliable Cross-Platform Task Manager
Todoist is the task manager we reach for when reliability matters more than features. Across three weeks of daily use on iOS, web, and Linux, sync stayed consistent and natural-language input parsed dates and recurrences correctly in roughly 95% of our captures. Its main weaknesses are a free tier that has tightened over time (now 5 active projects, 5 collaborators) and several power features — reminders, filters, calendar layout — locked behind Pro.
Reach Theo via editorial@independent-app-reviews.org with the subject line "Attn: Theo".