Five stubborn people and a drawer full of chest straps
Applandica is an independent testing lab for health and biohacking apps, based in New York. We started in 2023 because every "best sleep app" list we could find was ranked by commission rate. Ours is ranked by data.
Health apps are medical-adjacent products sold with consumer-software ethics. Somebody should be measuring them like instruments, not reviewing them like gadgets.
Everyone here tests. Nobody here sells.
We're deliberately small. Five people can hold one standard in their heads; twenty freelancers cannot.
Ian Stemberg
Co-founder & CEOSpent eleven years building backend systems before a burnout year turned into a measurement obsession. Wrote the first version of the rubric on a whiteboard in his apartment and has been defending it ever since. Leads recovery and training reviews.
Priya Raghunathan
Co-founder & Head of TestingFormer clinical data scientist. Owns the benchmark rigs, the statistics, and the right to veto any claim we can't reproduce. If a number in a review looks too clean, she's the reason it isn't in there.
Hannah Weiss
Reviews Editor — SleepPhD in chronobiology, runs the home polysomnography setup and the sleep category. Has slept wired to a reference device more nights than she'd like to count.
Marcus Oyelaran
Senior Reviewer — MetabolicRegistered dietitian turned product critic. Covers CGM apps, nutrition logging and anything that scores your lunch. Deeply suspicious of food scores, including good ones.
Tomás Villaseca
Data & Privacy LeadRuns the teardowns: network captures, SDK inventories, permission audits and the deletion requests we file on every app. Maintains the pricing-history database that powers our intelligence work.
Reviewer — Mind & behaviour
Open rolePart-time, New York or remote-ish. You'll own meditation, CBT and behaviour-change apps, and you'll be expected to argue with the other five of us on Mondays. Get in touch →
How we stay independent
Reviews cost money to produce and earn none. That's a feature, and it only works because of the research desk.
Applandica sells market intelligence — the same scored database, pricing histories and category teardowns — to operators, investors and health systems. Those clients buy access to research. They do not buy influence over it, they see nothing before publication, and no client has ever changed a score. The people who write reviews are not the people who take sales calls.
How the intelligence business worksRevenue mix, 2026: 91% market intelligence subscriptions and custom research, 9% reader memberships. 0% advertising, affiliate or sponsorship — a line we publish annually.
44 Bond Street, Floor 3
New York, NY 10012
Editorial: desk@applandica.com
Corrections: corrections@applandica.com
Research desk: intelligence@applandica.com
How we got here
Ian publishes the first rubric and eleven reviews from his apartment. Nobody reads them.
The first PSG-referenced sleep test changes two published scores. We keep the corrections up.
An investor asks for the underlying database. The research desk is born, and reviews stop needing ads.
The team reaches its intended size. It stays there.
Methodology v6 adds Staying power. The drawer of chest straps requires a second drawer.