About

Why we built Picks By Humans

The "best apps" corner of the internet is broken. Every list looks like every other list because everybody is rotating through the same affiliate offers, and the rankings shuffle in lockstep with the commission rates. You can usually predict the top pick of an article by checking the affiliate program first.

We don't do that. Picks By Humans does not accept affiliate compensation, sponsorships, or commissions from any app reviewed on this site. Not "primarily." Not "mostly." None. We buy our own subscriptions or use the App Store free tiers. When that costs us money, we eat it.

What we actually do

Two reviewers — Lily Karras and James Hoang — handle every list. We pick a category. We download somewhere between fifteen and forty apps in that category. We use them daily for at least two to three weeks. The keystone categories (calorie tracking, habit tracking, note-taking) we have been using continuously for over two years across multiple device replacements.

Then we cut the list to five. The five that we'd actually keep on our home screen. Not the five with the best landing pages, not the five with the highest ratings, and definitely not the five with the best affiliate payouts.

What we won't do

We won't generate reviews with AI. Every word on this site is written by a named human reviewer.
We won't accept review units. If we use the paid tier of an app to test it, we paid for it.
We won't trade rankings for placement, partnership, or "extended trial" deals.
We won't republish app developer marketing copy as analysis.
We won't pretend to like an app we don't, even if it's the most popular pick in a category.

Why "by humans"

The bar for human-written content has dropped because so much of the web is now AI-spammed. The simple act of testing apps for three weeks before writing about them is now a differentiator, which is a depressing thing to write down. But it is what it is. Our promise to you is: a human, with a name, who used the app, formed an opinion, and put it on the page.