PICKLE

A native iOS calorie and macro tracker built for the fastest possible log. The category's real killer is logging friction, not motivation.

Live on the App Store · iPhone only, iOS 26 · local-first, no account

Home	AI logging	Explore
Coach	Activity

SwiftUI, true-OLED-black with white and gray chrome. Color is earned rather than painted: a progressive Whoop-graded calorie gauge (white, then green, yellow, orange, and red only when you are over), natural-color food photography, and one warm accent reserved for goal moments.

What it does

• Home - greeting header with reminders bell, a navigable week strip (tap a day; logging on a past day backfills to that day), a 270-degree progressive calorie gauge with a glass lens knob, monochrome macro cards, a Predicted meal card (local heuristic: your usual next meal, one tap to log), today's meals, quick links.
• Log (5 ways, from any tab via the floating bar) - Recents (one-tap re-log), Search (Open Food Facts plus a bundled ~80-item common-foods set), barcode Scan (VisionKit), AI photo and text estimate, and Quick add (raw kcal/P/C/F).
• Meal reminders - real local notifications with generic lock-screen copy (never food names), per-meal times, auto-skip for meals you already logged, tap opens the Log sheet on that meal.
• Explore - curated, one-tap-loggable recipes (natural-color photography) and categories.
• Coach - an adaptive weekly target (a poor-man's MacroFactor from logged intake plus weight trend), plan transparency, and a card that reads your patterns.
• Activity - month calendar with day-states, streak, stats, per-day detail.
• More - Goals & Plan, Apple Health, Favorites, Custom Foods, Loved Meals, Export (CSV/JSON), About (with a DEBUG median seconds-to-log readout: the north-star metric, measured).
• WidgetKit - lock and home-screen calorie arcs with the same progressive ramp, macros widget, shared App Group snapshot.

Stack

• SwiftUI + SwiftData (@Model, local-first; CloudKit-compatible, sync currently off).
• XcodeGen generates Pickle.xcodeproj from project.yml (the .xcodeproj is gitignored).
• Design system: single token funnel (Shared/PaletteValues.swift feeds app Palette and widget W, so drift is a compile error), SF Pro with Dynamic Type preserved via UIFontMetrics scaling, Liquid Glass cards/bar (iOS 26), WCAG contrast gates enforced by unit tests.
• Icons: Hugeicons (stroke-rounded) as template PDFs, plus a few Lucide glyphs.
• iOS 26 deployment target. Targets: Pickle (app), PickleWidgetExtension, PickleTests, PickleUITests. Shared snapshot and palette code in Shared/. AI proxy Worker in proxy/.

Build & run

No API key is needed to build. AI logging goes through the deployed Worker, so the example config covers everything else.

cp Config/Secrets.example.xcconfig Config/Secrets.xcconfig
xcodegen generate

Pick a simulator and run the suite against it by id. Matching on name alone is ambiguous if you have more than one iPhone 17 Pro installed:

xcrun simctl list devices available | grep 'iPhone 17 Pro'

xcodebuild -project Pickle.xcodeproj -scheme Pickle \
  -destination 'platform=iOS Simulator,id=PUT-A-UDID-HERE' \
  -derivedDataPath /tmp/pickle-dd \
  CODE_SIGNING_ALLOWED=NO CODE_SIGNING_REQUIRED=NO test

DEBUG launch args for the screenshot loop: --seed, --seed-empty, --seed-over, --reset, --tab N, --open log|ai|quick|detail|widgets|more-<route>.

Tests

125 unit tests, green: store logic, prediction engine, reminder scheduling, week math, and the WCAG contrast and ramp gates. Plus UI tests for More-tab routing and horizontal-pan regressions. No third-party dependencies in any target.

Notes and tradeoffs

The AI key never ships in the binary. The first version put the Anthropic key in Info.plist, which anyone can pull out of a build with unzip and plutil. It now exists only as a Cloudflare Worker secret and the app calls /estimate. That relocates the trust boundary to the server, where the next step is App Attest so the endpoint only answers real installs.

The model is not trusted. parseItems in the Worker pulls the first JSON object out of the response and clamps every field before the app ever sees it: at most six items, calories to 0-4000, macros to 0-1000, confidence to 0-1. The app then applies its own sanity gate on top. Two independent checks, because a tracker that occasionally logs 40,000 calories is worse than one that occasionally logs nothing.

Sync is designed but off. The SwiftData models are CloudKit-legal and AppConfig.useCloudKit is false. The merge logic is unit-tested against simulated histories rather than two real devices, and those tests prove the merge function, not the sync. Turning it on is a device-verification job, not a code one, so it stays off until that happens.

Privacy

Diary and health data stay on device (and in your iCloud once sync is on). Notifications never show food names on the lock screen. The one exception to on-device: AI logging sends the described or photographed meal to the AI service to estimate macros, then discards it. Config/Secrets.xcconfig and the reference frames are gitignored.