Treat a credit file like a school report with a few loud lines. Payment history asks whether agreed payments showed up. Busy limit asks how much of the available room is already in use. Age and mix ask how long the file has been watching you, and whether it has seen more than one kind of account. You do not need to love the system to read it.
A single number sold by an app is a headline, not the report. Headlines hide which line is noisy. If you only chase the headline, you might 'fix' a line that was already fine and ignore the one a lender will notice.
A pretend example. Pretend Cam's headline number wobbled. The report itself showed on-time payments, a card limit of 1,000 with 800 busy, and a short history. The noisy line was the busy limit, not the personality of the number.