Smackerel

A completely private food journal that learns your palate. Snap a meal, rate it later from your lock screen, and watch your taste fingerprint take shape.

Smackerel is a personal food journal built for one person: you.

Snap a photo of what you're eating, give it a name, and a couple of hours later rate it — right from your lock screen. Do that a few times and something quietly remarkable happens: Smackerel starts to know your palate. Not a star average. Not a crowd score. Your taste fingerprint — the smoky, the charred, the spicy, the things you reach for and the things you quietly push aside.

BUILD YOUR TASTE FINGERPRINT

The Palate tab is the heart of Smackerel. As you log meals and jot a line about each one, an on-device model reads your notes and sketches your taste over time:

• Three dials — Spice, Salt, Richness — tuned to how you actually eat • "You gravitate to" and "you steer clear of" word lists, drawn from your own words • A running feed of small discoveries: "You go for smoky and charred edges," "Numbing-tingly heat agrees with you"

It gets sharper every time you log. The magic is silent — there's no chatbot, no "Ask AI" button. Your palate just grows with you.

ONE TAP TO LOG

Logging a meal is featherweight. Snap, name it, save. The thoughtful part — the rating and the note — comes later, when a gentle reminder lands on your lock screen: "How was the koji-aged ribeye?" Tap Love, Good, Mid, Meh, or No without even opening the app. Already have a camera roll full of meals? Import them in a batch; Smackerel reads the date and location and suggests the restaurant for you.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN

• No accounts. No login. Ever. • No ads, no feed, no social, no noise. • Your photos stay in your own Apple Photos library — Smackerel never deletes them. • Your palate is built on-device with Apple Intelligence. Nothing leaves your phone unless you choose to turn on the optional frontier-model boost.

A LITTLE HISTORY

Years ago, just before Instagram, I built a small app called dish-on-it: photograph your food, rate it, and find the best version of the dish you were craving. People used it for two things — keeping a private journal of what they ate, and quietly sharing what was good with the people they trusted. Then Instagram arrived and we moved on.

Years later, backpacking around the world, a friend asked: "Do you have a list of restaurants you love?" They knew my taste. I wished I still had that little app. So I built it again — this time completely private, just for the joy of remembering what you ate and discovering who you are at the table.

Today, Smackerel is a smart journal. Tomorrow it may become more. This is a project I built for friends and family, and you're welcome to use it. If you like it, help me make it better. If you don't… well, delete it then.

Hello, Smackerel.

Available on iPhone (iOS 26 or later). Uses on-device Apple Intelligence, with optional escalation to frontier models (Anthropic).

Some mackerel were sustainably harmed and enjoyed as sushi in the making of this app.