Search demand lumps Lumosity, Elevate, Peak, BrainHQ, and NeuroNation into one bucket: "brain training apps." Product design does not.
Three different product jobs
- Language / productivity drills (Elevate-shaped): reading, writing, listening, math fluency. Progress charts track those drills.
- Cognitive mini-games (Lumosity / Peak-shaped): memory, attention, flexibility, speed under time pressure.
- Reasoning practice (what I ship): adaptive multiple-choice distinctions at your edge, with an honest practice score that is not a clinical IQ claim.
If you evaluate all three with the same KPI ("raises IQ"), you will misread the literature and mis-buy the subscription.
What the evidence usually supports
Independent reviews of commercial brain training typically find:
- Near transfer: you get better at the trained tasks and close cousins.
- Far transfer: weak under careful controls for everyday reasoning / general intelligence.
Useful anchors: Simons et al. 2016; Melby-Lervåg, Redick & Hulme 2016 on working-memory training. Pick the app whose drills match the skill you actually want to practice.
I keep a public claim-size map here: intelligencemax.ai/guide (OSF: osf.io/kja9b).
Why this matters for builders
If you are shipping adaptive difficulty, do not market "adaptive" as "clinically validated IQ gains." Adaptive means the item bank tracks an ability estimate for your task family. That is useful. It is still not an IQ test.
Disclosure: I build IntelligenceMax, an iOS reasoning gym. Practice estimate ≠ clinical IQ.
Quick chooser
| Want… | Prefer… |
|---|---|
| Grammar / reading fluency games | Elevate-like |
| Short attention/memory mini-games | Lumosity/Peak-like |
| Hard MCQ reasoning under adaptive difficulty | Reasoning gym |
Same aisle. Different drills. Claim size is the product.
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