John Graham-Cumming's blog: For no apparent reason Oral-B removed flossing from their app
2026-08-19
For no apparent reason Oral-B removed flossing from their app
Look I hate blog posts bitching about software but having tried to contact P&G to no avail here I am. I have used an Oral-B IO toothbrush with the Oral-B app for years and somehow they decided to update the app and remove flossing.<br>Why would you remove flossing?<br>What's happened is an app redesign where a very simple and clear interface has turned into something. I can only assume a designer got to the app with some goal to do something and then messed with it. The same designer clearly doesn't actually use an Oral-B toothbrush or clean their teeth properly.<br>Here's how it used to work.<br>When you'd finished cleaning your teeth you'd see a screen like this:
And scrolling down you'd get a screen like this:
You're presented with two separate sections "Brushing Experience" (what happened while you were brushing) and "Additional Routines" (what you actually did). And the Yes/No buttons are colour coded where blue is ideal and red is bad (and that's different between the two sections because No is good for bleeding gums but bad for Flossed?).<br>You'd clean your teeth, click those buttons and hit Save. Not any more.
Unfortunately, someone has decided that this simple, clear interface needs to be replaced with something worse. The first clue that something is horribly wrong is the app's new Home Screen which has a new "Morning Routine" which, look carefully, doesn't talk about flossing.
And it gets worse from there because flossing is still being tracked. You'll see in the history that you didn't answer yes or no because you couldn't.
The only way to actually set it is to brush you teeth, answer the questions about tongue cleaning and rinsing and then go back to the list of brushing sessions, find today's session, click on it, click edit, click Yes for flossing, click Save.
Why P&G? Why?
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August 19, 2026
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Labels:<br>pseudo-randomness,<br>rants and raves
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