Board Foot Calculator Apps for Android

This is a working comparison of five Android options, written for people who bid, order, and take delivery on lumber for a living. No formula refresher, no explanation of what a quarter is. The question here is narrower: which board foot calculator app for android holds up when the tape says 6' 2-13/16", the crew is waiting, and a rounding error becomes a short order or a return trip.

The criteria that matter on a paid job

Before the apps, the filter used to rank them. A board foot calculator app for Android earns a place on a working phone only if it clears all six:

• Input speed under real conditions. Fraction entry that matches the tape, no mental conversion, no decimal typos with a work glove half off.
• Arithmetic you can defend. If a number goes into a bid or a purchase order, it needs to be right at the sixteenth, not "close enough after rounding."
• Offline operation. Basements, steel buildings, rural mill yards. An app that needs a handshake with a server is dead weight.
• Output someone else can read. A total on a screen is worth less than a CSV or PDF you can attach to a PO, a change order, or a subcontractor's cut sheet.
• No ad layer. A banner over the keypad is not an annoyance, it's a mis-tap waiting to happen.
• Yield planning, not just pricing. Knowing a board is 9.4 BF is trivia. Knowing how many 8/4 boards to buy to get 34 parts out with minimum drop is money.

1. Board Foot Calculator+ — the one built around a tape measure

Android · free tier · $7.99 one-time Pro · no ads · no subscription
View on Google Play

This is the only app in the category that treats fractional entry as the product rather than a checkbox. It ships a custom keypad with a fraction grid down to 1/32", so a reading of 5' 3-1/4" goes in exactly as read. Nothing gets converted in your head, nothing gets truncated on long entries, and the app doesn't quietly chop a 15/16" into a decimal that drifts.

Underneath, every value is carried as whole 1/32" integers rather than floats, with 245 automated tests behind the arithmetic. That matters less as a technical detail and more as a liability question: numbers that go into a bid should not depend on a floating-point rounding path nobody has audited.

Thickness accepts quarters or straight inches, and the calculator takes width, length, count, waste percentage and price per BF in a single pass. Free also includes a fraction calculator for running tape math — subtracting a 2-11/16" reveal off a 7' 6-3/8" opening without stopping to convert — plus one live project with running board footage and cost totals you can share as text.

What the $7.99 unlock adds, in order of usefulness to a contractor:

• Cut list optimizer — parts in, cutting diagram out, with waste percentage and the actual board count to purchase. This is the difference between an estimate and a materials order.
• CSV and PDF export — attach the cut list to a PO, hand it to a shop, or file it with the job folder.
• Unlimited projects — one per job, not one at a time.
• Species price book — your negotiated $/BF per species, pulled straight into pricing instead of re-typed each time.
• Wood movement calculator — dimensional change across 43 species from USDA Wood Handbook data (Table 4-3), checked line by line against the source. Relevant if you install wide stock, panels, or exterior trim and would rather not warranty a cupped run.

Fully offline, no account, nothing phoned home. Ad-free at both tiers.

Honest limits: Android only for now. It does finished and rough lumber, not log scaling, so if you buy timber on the stump or scale loads at the landing you'll pair it with one of the log tools below. It's also a recent listing, so it hasn't stacked up years of review count.

2. Board Foot Calculator (SiMAGO) — the default free result

The app most search results land on. Live since 2020, 10,000+ installs, hovering around 3.8 stars. Functionally it's thickness × width × length × pieces, with an optional price field for a total.

Why it doesn't hold up on a paid job:

• Legibility failures in shipped builds. Reviewers have described updates where input fields vanish once they lose focus and typed digits get clipped so the top or bottom half of the number is cut off. Fixes have gone out, but a calculator whose display you have to squint at is one you cannot quote from.
• No fraction keypad. You're converting sixteenths mentally or typing decimals — the exact step where errors enter a takeoff.
• Nothing downstream. No cut optimization, no project files, no export. It produces a number for one board and stops.
• Third-party data sharing per the Play listing, which is more than an offline arithmetic tool should require.

Reasonable as a spot-check on your phone. Not a tool to run material orders through.

3. Board Feet Calculator (Dundridge) — right idea, unfinished

The premise is closer to a professional workflow than most: calculate footage and save individual boards so a mill or dealer run has a total before you commit. Saved lists are what separates a calculator from a tally sheet.

Where it breaks:

• Decimal display is unreliable. The dominant review complaint is that anything with decimals renders incorrectly. Whole-number cases work — and whole-number cases are the ones nobody needs an app for.
• Intermittent function. One reviewer's summary is that it's good when it works and it doesn't work often. Intermittent is worse than absent, because you find out mid-order.
• No optimization, no export, no pricing structure beyond the basics.
• Stalled maintenance. The same complaints have sat unresolved long enough to be treated as permanent.

4. Timberlog — a serious log board foot calculator, wrong fit for the shop

Give Timberlog credit: as a log board foot calculator it's the most complete option on Android. Round volume from diameter or circumference, sawn volume from thickness/width/length, and a deep list of scaling standards — Doyle, Scribner Decimal C, International 1/4", Ontario Scaler's Rule, Roy, Hoppus quarter-girth, Huber, Smalian, plus European standards. Lists export to Excel.

Where it costs you time:

• Metric-first orientation. Cubic metres and CFT sit at the centre; board feet is one output among many. An all-imperial crew is constantly navigating around units it never uses.
• Depth you'll never bill for. The breadth of scaling standards is genuine expertise aimed at forestry, and it makes the interface heavier for the one calculation you run repeatedly.
• No rough-lumber conventions. No quarter thickness, no fraction keypad — the two things a hardwood buyer touches most.
• No cut list optimization. It quantifies volume. It doesn't plan yield.

If your business is buying logs, this earns its place. If your business is turning boards into work, it's the wrong end of the process.

5. Sawlog Calc Personal — narrow, competent, aging

Sawlog Calc estimates weight and lumber yield from log length and small-end diameter under Doyle, Scribner and International 1/4", with average weights for 100+ North American species. It has a following among sawmill operators for good reason — it does one job without ceremony.

The limits:

• Round stock only. No milled board footage, no material pricing for finished stock, no cut lists, no project records.
• Geometric yield, no defect handling. Users note you still downgrade by eye for sweep, crook and rot. Fine for an experienced scaler, useless as a documented figure.
• Licence friction. Tally sheets and email export are Pro-only, and at least one buyer reports a Pro purchase from an older device refusing to activate on a newer Samsung — a real problem when your tools outlive your phones.
• Interface age. It works and it isn't going anywhere new.

Deal-breaker matrix

Recommendation by trade

Finish carpentry, cabinet shops, millwork, remodelers. Board Foot Calculator+. It's the only option where tape input, quarter thickness, waste factor, per-species pricing, cut optimization and exportable output live in one app with no ad layer between you and the keypad.

Timber buyers and scalers. Run a dedicated log board foot calculator — Sawlog Calc for fast Doyle or Scribner yield estimates in the field, Timberlog when you need multiple standards and a record you can export.

Mixed operations. Two apps, no overlap: a log tool for what comes off the truck, Board Foot Calculator+ for everything after it's been through the mill.

The category-level observation is simple. The free tools are single-formula screens with unresolved display bugs, the forestry apps are excellent at logs and indifferent to shop work, and exactly one board foot calculator app for Android is designed around the instrument you actually use. Against a single short order on 8/4 stock, a $7.99 one-time purchase is not a decision worth deliberating.