The Arcal journal.

Notes on how AI food scanning actually works, where it breaks, and what is happening in the category. Written plainly.

August 23, 2026

The 20 best calorie tracking apps in 2026

Every serious calorie and macro tracker worth knowing about in 2026, ranked on pricing transparency, feature completeness at the price you actually pay, and privacy.

August 23, 2026

Why Arcal doesn't have a free tier

Free tiers in this category are usually funded by ads or engineered to convert you to paid. Here is why Arcal picked one plan instead.

August 23, 2026

What two-way Apple Health sync actually means

Most calorie trackers only push data into Apple Health. Reading from it too changes what your calorie budget is actually based on.

August 23, 2026

The hidden cost of free calorie tracking apps

Free calorie trackers are not free to build or run. Understanding what actually funds the free tier is worth knowing before you hand over months of your eating habits.

August 23, 2026

Why "accurate" is the most overused word in calorie tracking

Nearly every AI calorie tracker claims to be accurate. Here is what the documented error rates actually look like once you dig past the headline percentage.

August 23, 2026

How to track calories without weighing every meal

A kitchen scale is the most accurate way to log food and the fastest way to quit. Here is what actually works day to day.

August 23, 2026

Why a 20 million food database isn't as useful as it sounds

MyFitnessPal's database size is real and genuinely useful for packaged food. It is also crowd-sourced, and that comes with a specific, well-known accuracy problem.

August 21, 2026

Why portion size is the hardest part of calorie tracking

Identifying food from a photo is close to solved. Estimating how much of it there is remains the real bottleneck in every AI calorie tracker, including this category as a whole.

August 16, 2026

MyFitnessPal acquired Cal AI. Here's what actually changed.

A plain read of the March 2026 acquisition: what Cal AI users get, what stays the same, and what it means for the AI food-scanning category.

August 10, 2026

How AI food photo scanning actually works

What happens between taking a photo of your plate and getting a calorie count, and why portion size is the hard part.

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Arcal launches soon on iPhone. Waitlist members get access before everyone else.