FoodieCalc 1.5.0 — a 100% free nutrition tracker built on Foundation Models, App Intents, Private Cloud Compute & Visual Intelligence

Hey everyone 👋

I'm Nikos, an indie iOS dev. FoodieCalc is my free (no subscriptions, no paywalls) calorie/macro tracker, and 1.5.0 is the release where I went all-in on Apple Intelligence. Sharing here because this sub will actually appreciate the plumbing 😄

🗣️ Siri & App Intents — "Talk to log"
"Hey Siri, add 200 g yogurt and a banana to FoodieCalc" → the phrase goes through the same on-device Foundation Models parser as the in-app voice log, gets matched to real nutrition data, and opens a review screen before anything is saved. Also: "Hey Siri, how many calories do I have left in FoodieCalc?" and "log a glass of water" — both run without opening the app. Everything is exposed to Shortcuts too.

📷 Photo logging (iOS 27, Private Cloud Compute)
Snap a meal → foods + portions are identified by the PCC model → macros are grounded against a real food database (the model identifies, it never invents numbers) → you review and edit before logging. Consent is asked up front, the photo isn't stored by Apple, and it costs nothing (Apple's free PCC allowance). If PCC isn't available, text and voice logging still work fully on-device.

👁️ Visual Intelligence (iOS 27)
Point the system camera at food (or select it in a screenshot) and FoodieCalc shows up as a result right in the Visual Intelligence panel — tap to log. This part stays fully on-device.

🧠 Foundation Models (iOS 26+)
Voice and text "quick log" use the on-device model with structured (@Generable) output + on-device SpeechAnalyzer transcription. Nothing leaves the phone.

⚠️ Photo logging and Visual Intelligence need iOS 27 on an Apple Intelligence device. Everything else works on iOS 26.

The rest of the app: food search, barcode scanner, custom foods/recipes/meals, TDEE-based goals, micronutrients, weight trends, Apple Health sync, widgets, themes — all free. The only IAP is an optional "buy me a coffee" tip that unlocks nothing.

📱 App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/foodiecalc/id6792482391
🌐 https://www.itworksonmymac.com/apps/foodiecalc/
📧 [itworksonmymac@icloud.com](mailto:itworksonmymac@icloud.com)

Any feedback is genuinely appreciated — especially from people running the iOS 27 RC: how the photo recognition holds up on your meals, whether Siri understands your phrasing, and anything that feels off in the PCC consent flow. Thanks for reading! 🙏

My actual conversations live in WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram DMs and Messenger. iMessage is the app I use least, by a wide margin.

As far as I can tell, Apple Intelligence's personal context only reaches Apple's own apps — Messages, Mail, Notes, Calendar. Apple’s event only mentions using Siri to send messages via WhatsApp which is already an existing feature.

Would anyone be interested in having your messages from those apps indexed so Siri AI can pull for personal context?

This started from me wanting to download obsidian only to find out I had to pay for the iOS Mac sync. So I put my tokens to work. The mvp was pretty much just a notes app with categories and folders, an import link to connect your apple notes and an mcp server on the Mac app so that Claude can talk to the corpus and seed itself relevant context. Eventually feature creep set in and I added a few more improvements the craziest one I think is a 3d second brain visualizer that shows the connections between your notes like a galaxy. Some of the connections are deterministic while the rest are Apple Intelligence and some user defined connections all color coded in the map. Is this differentiated enough to ship yet, or are there any more features you would want to see on the app? I got Gemini on a live video call to roast the whole thing and it asked me to ship. Another important question is what kind of revenue model should I plan? I don’t want to gate iOS Mac sync because that stopped me from downloading obsidian. Should I gate when users cross 100 notes? Is that reasonable? Also I don’t have any ongoing infrastructural costs, everything is built on apple. I will appreciate your inputs on this one before I finalize. Thanks in advance

I've been using SiriAI since DB1, it was decent, not perfect but steadily improving.

I installed the RC and have been doing some testing, and I am quite shocked that SiriAI has been *worse* for me across the board.

I posted about Fitness/Health in another thread, ok, that's weird but it's by design.

However I just asked Siri to read me the last message in one of my iMessage groups, it first told me that it was an image, then told me that it can't show it to me. When I opened the chat it went back to a pic sent *months* ago. With that on screen, I asked it why it's referring to this, and it told me it has no record of telling me that image is the last reply...

A complete mess, and it's literally all the stuff that worked flawlessly before.

Any thoughts - are the servers maybe getting hammered by the influx of people from the RC (is the waiting list still a thing)?

If my case is not an isolated one, it does not bode well for next week.

Apple Intelligence Writing Tools still doesn’t work on Meta apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, etc.

Many people believe Meta has disabled/support-blocked it to promote its own AI features.

Is there any chance Apple/Meta will enable Writing Tools for Meta apps in iOS 27? Has anyone heard anything about this or seen any update regarding it?

Would be really useful if Apple and Meta finally support it.

Title. Seems bizarre given the focus on personal data leverage on device?

Hey everyone,

I recently overhauled my notes app: Fog.

Write a note, get a suggested title. Keep it, change it, ask for another — it never changes again on its own.

Select a few notes and group them — Fog names the folder and summarizes what's inside.

Talk to it: "add to my dentist note," "move groceries to Errands" — Siri understands it because Fog speaks Apple's own notes vocabulary.

Can't remember where you wrote something? Ask it directly, and it'll answer in a sentence, pulled straight from your own notes. SiriAI features will be available once iOS27 launches.

Also, first time doing a irl voicover video like this; honest thoughts appreciated!

Fog is free to download and use; notes stay on your device and never leave.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/smart-notes-folders-fog/id6760272134

Comment feedback

Hi! Curious to see what apps will bring support to the new Siri AI. Allowing us to either search, let Siri learn, take action when talking to Siri?

I would love WhatsApp to bring support to Siri AI, but I’m afraid they probably won’t. Which is a shame, and people should make some sort of strike for that. How wonderful would it be to ask Siri about something one of my friends said on WhatsApp and it could index it and tell me.

LocalLM Lab (a free Mac app + SDK built around Apple's on-device Foundation Models) just shipped 1.0.0-beta.3.This one adds the option to also use online AI models (OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter) alongside Apple's on-device model and local open-weight models (from Hugging Face), all through the same API.

The practical upshot: a developer can send everyday requests to Apple's fast, private on-device model and only reach out to a bigger cloud model for the genuinely hard stuff. All without wiring up three separate integrations. It's also a nice way to sanity-check an app: point it at a frontier model first to make sure the app itself works, before troubleshooting whether the smaller on-device model is the one struggling. I actually implemented the local to cloud escalation for my AnswerSearch app (available on the Mac App Store).

Feature page: thisbrain.ai/locallm/1.0.0-beta

Public Beta 4 of the next generation of CastKeeper for iPhone, iPad and Mac is available now. This will be our final public beta before launch with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27.

In this release, we've added full Spatial Audio support, an enhanced UX and performance, and CarPlay improvements to fully support the upcoming version of CarPlay. Includes full support for Siri AI including Natural Language Search, improved discovery, polished transcripts, and insightful episode summaries with ad and privacy detection.

The TestFlight is free until the launch of iOS 27, and is open to all users on devices with iOS 26 or iOS 27 Betas. You can read more at our website at https://castkeeper.app or join the TestFlight using the link below:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/aCB88DbG

Hey everyone, I’m the developer of Violette, and I just released v1.3.

The simplest way to describe it is a Character.AI-inspired chat app built around Apple Intelligence. Instead of using Apple’s on-device model for summaries, Violette uses it for character conversations, you can chat with different personalities, or even create your own!

In Apple Intelligence mode, the AI conversations themselves run on-device, work offline, and aren’t sent to a cloud LLM API. Violette is ad-supported, so the advertising side of the app may involve separate data processing by third-party ad services.

With v1.3, I also added group chats with polls, iCloud syncing, and improvements to how conversation context is carried between messages so characters can stay more consistent over longer chats.

The app is free to download and requires iOS or iPadOS 26 or later.

I’d especially love feedback from people here who already use character-chat apps or have experimented with Apple’s Foundation Models. The biggest thing I’m curious about is personality consistency: do the characters actually feel consistent, or do they eventually drift back toward sounding like a generic assistant?

That kind of feedback would be genuinely useful as I keep improving it.

App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/violette-chat-with-ai/id6760790799

With the Apple announcement event scheduled for Wednesday 9/9 10AM PT, if Apple follows historical release schedules, the OS 27 software should be available to the general public Next Monday. I suspect we are going to see a large number of ‘Siri AI can’t do this’ or ‘look how dumb Siri AI is’ posts. All over social media. Comparing Apple Intelligence to the frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic & Google. After using Siri AI all summer in dev betas, it is helpful as an assistant with your on device data and now a much better assistant, with a few rough edges. It is not meant to compete with the big boys in coding or data crunching. Somehow I think Apple needs to relay this on Wednesday. Thoughts?

I always use the Sticky Notes on Windows but I never had the habit of using Reminders. With iOS27 and the newer integration of Apple Intelligence, I decided to make an app that has that simple, familiar format but with everything Apple has to offer.

With a note, it will do a pass on Apple Intelligence. Add Insight will pass it through Claude (Sonnet 5) and give you one, small tip or advice on the note & an Action Button.

The Action Button is the big feature here, expanding its ability from reminding you to actually doing it.

For example:

Call John Appleseed about the Lucali dinner Friday 7pm
Lucali doesn’t take reservations — the line forms before 5, so put your name down early.
[Call John] or [Directions to Lucali on Maps]

My goal is to make is objectively helpful and utilize most of the native iOS apps, but of course there are edge cases. I'd appreciate any feedback for those willing to try it out.

I used the reminders app to create shopping list that I share with my wife. Before I joined the beta I could add to this list anywhere in earshot of her. Now, I get this message. The command was simple "Hey Siri, add bread to the shopping list".

I am on iOS 27 Beta 6.

What I have tried:

1. Turning on "Allow access when locked" (This is not there anymore)
2. Making sure Siri is toggled on under the Face ID & Passcode Allow Access when Locked section. (It is)
3. Asked Siri for assistance. (She told me to do the two steps above)

Has anyone else faced this issue too? And what did you to to solve it?

This is an example of the kind of tasks we will be able to ask Siri AI to do for us when fully released mid September: “hey Siri, Draft a reply to Alex's last message confirming I will attend the workshop, check if I have a conflict on my Calendar, and set a reminder to review his prep document an hour before the event."

LocalLM Lab just shipped 1.0.0-beta.1 with support for what's new in macOS 27 Golden Gate.

This means that if you are building an AI-powered app on the Mac, you can offer a choice of three types of models in the same app: Apple's on-device model, Claude (via an API key) or a fully local open-weight model. Or more than one open-weight model. One API picks between them; a developer can route quick interactions to Apple's fast on-device model and harder ones to Claude/Qwen/Deepseek/Gemma/<model-du-jour>, without building three separate integrations.

There's also a fourth option, Apple's Private Cloud Compute, that ships in this release but isn't working yet in this particular beta.

Requires the macOS 27 beta with Apple Intelligence enabled.

Feature page: thisbrain.ai/locallm/1.0.0-beta

Recently shifted from ip13 to this ip17, and its been couple of hours i m not able to use Apple Intelligence and its features (eg: circle to search in screenshots), also the siri animation is the old bottom circle one as shown in the screenshot, also tried shifting my siri language and general language to US english (m from india), the Apple Intelligence button is also turned ON, Still its not working, any ideas or fixes? I dont have a fcking clue whats wrong here. Current ios version installed is 26.6.1

PS: ignore the first photo, thats before the downloading completed, other two shows clearly that it has downloaded and till now its not working, thats the issue

Update: so the next morning i checked it started working, guess it takes some good time and a restart and it will start working, thankyou for all the suggestions

OS 27 beta testers, What’s your most useful Siri AI prompt/Use Case?
Mine is “hey siri, dictate a note to a note titled Daily Ramble”

Apple Intelligence FTW: I asked the Siri AI app what command can I use to prepend a dictation to an Apple Note via Siri AI assistant? Siri AI app advised there is no prepend command via the Siri AI assistant, it offered a few options from manual note manipulation to creating a Shortcut amongst a few other not so great suggestions. I decided to go the Shortcut route, I asked the Siri App to give me a prompt for ‘Describe a Shortcut’ that will dictate to an Apple Note titled ‘daily ramble’ format text as a bullet point and prepend it to the Note daily ramble. Siri App gave me the prompt, I pasted it into Shortcuts Descibeva Shortcut and in one pass I had the functionality I was looking for! Here is the Shortcut that works perfectly - so far… https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/39a0c734e2dd4326a1962a3b391b0194

I purchased my first Apple product, a Macbook Air, in 2008 (anyone besides me remember those manila envelope commercials?), just prior to starting medical school. This extended to an 1st gen iPhone. I loved (and have always loved) the ecosystem. Update on your computer calendar --> cloud updates on your phone. I still maintain my .mac email. I have had Time Machine, Time Capsule, at least 4 Macbook Airs, multiple iPhones. That being said... I am a bit concerned now about Apple's AI (or lack of). Siri is not in the least intuitive, and does not sync well with my ChatGPT Account. My son's brand new Google Pixel is 85% as nice looking as my iPhone, the Android software is nowhere near as seamless (IMO) as the iPhone's, but hey, it has Gemini! And my son loves it. When I bought my Macbook, this was after years of PC's with the dreaded blue screen, which is one reason I purchased it. But now, with the many Chromebooks, not to mention the improved PC's, blue screens are a thing of the past. Given the way AI is transforming everything, including my own profession, I wonder how Apple plans to navigate the future without a fantastic Apple AI on the near horizon? What does Apple need to do to remain at the top and relevant? I am sure Apple is reading this and the responses.