Your Handy Guide to Sex Advice and Tracking Apps

Here’s a guest article! This one is by Dr Rebecca Saunders an academic researcher who led a project researching sex advice and tracking apps. 

Here, she reveals the truth about these apps and how it’s important that if you do use them, you do so critically. We also offer some advice on how you can have a better sex life and more fulfilling sexual relationships without using apps at all. Now, over to Rebecca – Justin.

About Sex Advice and Tracking Apps

App stores are now full of sex-related apps. Some simulate an entire relationship with an AI chatbot. Others are ‘Have You Ever’ type sex games. There are also some sexual health apps that (for example) help folks keep track of their PrEP medication (to prevent the transmission of HIV, read more about that here).

Our research team investigated 23 apps on Google Play and the Apple Store. We focused specifically on those that aimed to improve people’s sexual fulfilment. Whether through offering advice and guided ‘how to’ sessions or through tracking. We also analysed what thousands of users said about these apps in their reviews.

Sex advice and tracking apps promise they’ll make your sex life better, or help you connect with your partner, or solve your sexual issues, from trauma to erectile dysfunction. Almost half of the apps (43%) say they are ‘expert-led’. This gives the impression they’re sensible apps to download if you care about your sexual well-being. Because they’re presented as authoritative health technologies, you might assume they are vetted or regulated in some way. Well, they’re not. 

On these apps, the ‘expert advice’ can come from anyone. Such as from a sex therapist or a psychologist, or a porn star, or a yoga instructor, or a Christian pastor. We investigated what sort of information, tools, and advice these apps actually provide and whether they are really likely to improve your sexual well-being.

Tracking Your Sex Life

Over half of the apps analysed (52%) got users to track their sex lives, recording who they had sex with, when, and what they did. Lots of users said they really liked the tracking.

Quantifying aspects of our lives has become pretty common. Many of us count our steps, track our sleeping, or monitor our heartbeats with an app or smart device. But is tracking and quantifying our sexual relationships and experiences a good thing?

In order to turn sex into analysable data, sex tracking apps ask users to record sex in really basic ways. How long sex lasted, how many positions you did, and how many times you came. There are other features you can include as well. Was watching porn involved, did you use any ‘accessories’, and who initiated the sex?

This simple data is then presented to the user in the form of graphs. They can show you at a glance which day you had the most sex or which of your partners is the ‘best’. Users are encouraged to rank different partners, for example, by seeing who made them come the most. This quantification is supposed to give users, as many apps put it, ‘valuable insights’ into your sexual desires and relationships. 

Tracking the sex but not the feelings 

But does thinking about sex in this categorised and labelled way really help us have good sex? Do we want these basic, standardised ways of thinking about sex to frame how we think about sex? Someone could have tried 5 sexual positions, and the graphs and statistics on the app will display that as a success. But what if you didn’t feel safe, or listened to, or relaxed enough to actually enjoy it? Is that good?

So before leaping into tracking our sex lives, we should ask ourselves why we are actually doing it. Is counting and quantifying sex likely to deepen the meaning and pleasure of our sexual experiences?

Instead of tracking yourself on an app, you could also just keep a private diary. Or you could chat with your partner about it. What kind of thing did you like, what would you like more or less of next time? Here’s an advice article I wrote about how someone could overcome their embarrassment in answering questions about sex. Or try this one about sex talk and communication – Justin.

Do Apps Make You ‘Better’ at Sex?

Tracking sex also connects sex to ideas of fitness and health. 

70% of the apps we analysed were in the ‘Health and Fitness’ category on app stores. 52% of apps explicitly linked sex to fitness and many can be synced with health apps like Apple Health. Some sex tracking apps even calculate how many calories you’ve burned with each sexual encounter. Others that aim to help you boost your libido or expand your sexual repertoire, also frame these as sexual health issues. 

The implication is that by tracking and quantifying your sexual experiences, or by following other advice and exercises an app offers, you are taking care of your sexual health. But what constitutes healthy sex is pretty amorphous on these apps. Doing more sexual positions doesn’t make you more sexually ‘well’. And there isn’t a right ‘amount’ of desire that an app can help you reach. 

Being sexually fulfilled gets mixed up on these apps with ideas of sex as fitness and of tracking and quantifying sex as ‘good for you’. Engaging with these technologies is framed as a necessary health activity and something you should do, to make sex better. 

Sex advice and tracking apps put a lot of emphasis on improvement. Learn more exciting sexual skills. Make your partner more satisfied. Have the best orgasms; just be more sexual. But do we want sex to be something we have to monitor and manage? Do we have to be working hard to have good sex?

People really love the advice I have here at BISH about how to have sex. There’s also a whole section on how to make sex more enjoyable. Spoiler, the key is to feel comfortable and for there to be lots of communication and consent – Justin.

Porn Culture

On the subject of sex as hard work, another important finding we wanted to bring you relates to porn. Both sex advice and tracking apps draw heavily on porn culture.

48% of the apps we investigated mentioned pornography as a positive thing. They suggest people use it to turn themselves on, or to learn new things. On some apps, advice is explicitly delivered by porn stars, in guided video. For example on how to prepare for anal or how to give the best blow job. The advice they give on sexual fulfilment and pleasure is framed by ideas about sex from the performance industry. 

The issue with this is that people who aren’t professional sex workers and performers shouldn’t feel that the sex they have should echo what they see in porn. Sex in porn is built for viewers. It’s not necessarily about what feels good for the people doing it. 

There is also an unspoken message* on these apps – all the more powerful because it’s just assumed – that sex is heterosexual. It’s all about penises and vaginas and penetration. There’s no guide to fisting, for example, or a blow-by-blow account of how to give great head to a woman, or advice on sex with someone who’s transitioned gender. So, while these apps are marketed as tech that will revolutionise your sex life, the ideas about sex they communicate, like a lot of porn, are actually quite limiting. 

*I call these ‘Should Stories’ here at BISH. A powerful story, often an unspoken message, about what is ‘normal’ or ‘what everybody does’ which also reinforces how we ‘should’ do sex, relationships, and ‘us’. Check out the first module in my (free) Teach Yourself Sex Ed course – Justin

Tick Box Sex

Quantifying your sexual experiences on a sex tracking app is also really connected to porn. Porn platforms are all about breaking sex down into different labelled bits. This is exactly what sex tracking apps are asking you to do with your own sex life. Tracking apps emphasise orgasms and doing different positions as the important things in sex that need to be counted. This is a very ‘pornified’ way of thinking about sex. It turns users’ very personal and unique feelings and experiences of sex into a set list of things you check off like a ‘to-do’ list. 

Quantifying sex also turns your sexuality into something strangely external to you. The apps encourage you to think about sex from the outside in, not from the inside out. For example, looking at a graph about your sexual interactions that month. Or you’re scrolling through photos of yourself having sex (the apps encourage you do to do this too).

Bringing porn culture and body tracking together on these apps is a problem. Because these apps are presented as health and well-being technologies, it frames pornographic ideas of sex – visual, hard work and carefully managed – as somehow healthy. It takes a very specific, constructed and industrial type of sex and makes it seem like ‘porny sex’ is the only sex there is. 

Porny sex might be fun for some, but it’s really not the only kind of sex. For more about this you could start with the BISH Educational Guide to Porn or the ‘Sex We See’ part of the Teach Yourself Sex Ed course – Justin. 

Connecting to Ourselves and Each Other 

The last finding we think will interest BISH readers relates to our phones. 

Using any of these apps means spending more time on your phone. Many researchers have found that increased screen time and engagement with apps and platforms seriously impacts our mental health and self-esteem. We need to think about this in relation to these apps too. 

Sex advice and tracking apps market themselves as helping users improve their sexual connection with other people and themselves. One of the main motivations users describe for buying an app is that they want to improve their sexual connection with their partner or save their relationship altogether. 52% of apps referenced the importance of communication or provided some kind of support in this area. 

I’ve written a load of advice about how we can have a better relationship with our phones here – Justin.

Being With Our Partner

However, many of the communication activities revolved around people swapping basic lists of sexual acts they’re willing to try, or receiving a notification when they complete a set of ‘how to’ sessions. Is this really the best way to learn the skills of deep communication and intimacy? Being able to really listen to your partner, and getting comfortable talking about our own feelings, wants and limits, takes practice. It’s also part of what makes sex good. Farming out these essential parts of human relating to a standardised app may ultimately limit our capacity to connect. 

Here’s advice on how to make sex and relationships chats easier – Justin

And the more time we’re spending on an app, the less time we have to actually be with another person or ourselves. 83 users complained about the time that engaging with the app and managing notifications took up. A whopping 467 users said that technical glitches in their app, like the app asking them to fill out the same list of sexual fantasies for their partner to see over and over again, actively damaged their relationship. A handful of users also described using sex tracking apps to provide proof to their partner that they were initiating sex more or that they weren’t having enough sex. This is a very clear example of how using one of these apps can actually get in the way of healthy and consensual communication with another person.

Being In Our Bodies

Feeling connected to our own bodies is also essential for sex that makes us happy, safe and validated. This means learning to listen to our bodies and deepen our awareness of how our body feels. Though some sex advice apps do encourage meditation, being on our phones in general is not a very embodied experience. And thinking about sex in terms of quantities, fitness and porn categories, can put us in our heads, rather than in our bodies. Rather than a unique and intuitive connection to ourselves, we’re given a standardised set of rules or ideas about what sex ‘should’ be, box ticking different things to do sex ‘right’.  

These apps, even though they’re all about sex, can feel like they’re taking us further and further away from our own bodies and each other. 

There’s also a lot more of this kind of advice in the BISH bodies section including this one about how to feel better about your body. You might also like to skip ahead to the 9th module of the Teach Yourself Sex Ed course, this one on Bodies – Justin.

About the research

This research and this article for BISH was funded by GW4 and conducted in conjunction with the Digital Sexual Health and Well-being research group based at Cardiff University, director Dr Rebecca Saunders. 

Yay! Thank you so much Rebecca, this was super interesting. If you have any comments or questions about this dear reader, please leave them in the comment box below. Also, if you would like to hear a conversation between me and Rebcecca about her research into porn, you could listen to it at my nerdy podcast for adults Culture Sex Relationships. Justin.

© Justin Hancock, 2026 Find out more about me and BISH here.

BISH is run by me, Justin Hancock. I’ve been a trained sex and relationships educator since 1999. I’m a member of the World Association for Sexual Health. As well as BISH I also have resources, a podcast, and a coaching service for over 18s, as well as some of the best RSE teaching resources around. Find out out about my other work at justinhancock.co.uk. My work has featured (positively) in the media, like the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Sky One, and Novara Media.

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