BiteStrike help
BiteStrike photographs a plate and writes the calories and the macros into the day's diary. These pages explain what it can do, what it cannot, and how to get hold of us.
Anything not answered here: basgraaf262@icloud.com
One
Shoot the plate, or pick a photo you already took.
Two
A card comes back: the dish, the portion, the calories and the macros.
Three
Correct anything that looks off, then log it to breakfast, lunch, dinner or a snack.
Help topics
The ten questions that reach the mailbox most often.
Getting a photo that reads well
Frame the whole plate from above and give it light. Leaving a fork or your hand in the shot helps more than it looks like it should — the portion is judged against the things around it, so something of a known size in frame makes the weight estimate better.
"No food could be identified"
That is the app saying it could not find a dish in the frame, not that it broke. A closer shot from above, with more light and less of the table in view, usually settles it.
Other messages mean other things: the photo could not be sent is the connection, the answer came back in a form this app could not read is a bad reply from the service and is worth one more strike, and recognition is not set up means this build has no access key — the diary and logging by hand still work.
The numbers look wrong
Correct them. The dish name, the portion weight and the meal slot are all editable on the card before you log it, and changing the weight recalculates the calories and the macros with it.
Under the card you can also talk to the same shot: I ate half, it was fried in oil, swap the rice for buckwheat. A message that changes the food comes back as a new card rather than as a paragraph.
Logging without a photo
Tap Log by hand. Search the food table and give the portion weight — the energy and the macros follow from it — or type your own figures per 100 g when nothing in the table matches.
Hand-typed meals carry no accuracy caption, because no model was involved in them.
Where the daily target comes from
Five things you set in the profile: sex, age, height, weight and how active your days are, plus whether you want to lose, hold or gain. A standard energy formula turns them into a target, and the macro split follows the goal.
The target never drops below 1200 kcal, whatever the inputs say. Units are yours to pick: metric or imperial, kilocalories or kilojoules — and switching only changes how figures are written, never what the diary already holds.
Diet preferences and allergens
What you tick in the profile travels with each photo, so the estimate is made with it in mind.
An allergen is only ever flagged as looking present. A recipe cannot be seen in a picture, so treat that flag as a prompt to check, never as a clearance to eat.
The sample week
A week of example meals can be switched on during setup so the ring and the chart have something to show. It is off by default and can be removed from the profile at any time. Remove it before you read your own averages — until then it counts.
Deleting a meal, a diary, everything
Swipe a meal in the day's list to delete it; the day's totals are recalculated at once. Clear the diary removes every logged meal, its photo and the last shot, and keeps your profile and settings. Reset all data removes the diary, the profile and the last shot together and opens setup again. Neither can be undone.
The camera or the gallery is blocked
iOS holds those two permissions, so they are turned back on in iOS Settings under the app's own entry. If the device has no camera at all, pick a photo from the gallery instead — everything downstream is the same.
The prompt about tracking is separate again, and declining it changes nothing about how a plate is read.
Is there anything to pay for?
No. There is no subscription, no purchase and no paid tier hiding behind a feature. Reading a photo needs a connection; everything else — the diary, the target, the week chart, logging by hand — works with the network off.
How accurate is it, honestly
A calorie count read off a photograph is an estimate, not a measurement. Oil, butter and sugar rarely show up in a picture, the cooking method usually does not either, and the portion is judged against the plate and the cutlery rather than weighed. A figure here can be out by a wide margin in either direction.
BiteStrike is a diary. It is not a dietitian and not a medical service: it diagnoses nothing, prescribes nothing, and does not replace a qualified professional. Anything you intend to rely on, check.
What is sent, what stays here
The app shows this as a notice before the first photo is read, and you can decline it.
- Sent when you strike a plate
- The photo, the hint you typed, and the context the estimate needs: your diet preferences, your allergens, whether you are losing, holding or gaining, your daily target and how much of it the day already holds.
- Never sent
- Your name, your avatar and your body measurements. Opening the camera or picking a photo sends nothing on its own — nothing leaves the phone until you strike.
- Who reads the photo
- A general-purpose model from OpenAI, reached through the Runware API, which forwards the request and returns the answer. That work happens on their servers. The app names the same model in its own notice, so the two always agree.
- Declining the notice
- The diary, the daily target, the week chart and logging a meal by hand all carry on. Only reading a photo stops, and you can agree later at the next strike.
- Kept on this phone
- The diary with a photo per meal, your profile, and the last shot with its conversation. All three can be erased from the profile, and deleting the app removes them with it. None of it syncs anywhere, so a new phone starts empty and we cannot restore a diary for you.
- The formal version
- Retention, identifiers, analytics and your rights are set out in the privacy policy. Access and deletion requests go to the address below.
What it needs
- Device
- iPhone with iOS 16.0 or later. A camera is nice to have, not required.
- Connection
- Only for reading a photo. The rest of the app never touches the network.
- Languages
- English, French, Danish, Greek, Hungarian, Slovenian — set in the profile, or left to follow the phone.
Write to us
basgraaf262@icloud.com — a person reads it, usually within a working day or two.
Four lines make almost any report answerable in one reply:
- your iPhone model and its iOS version;
- what you were doing — a scan, the diary, the profile, first setup;
- the exact message on screen, if there was one;
- a screenshot, when the thing can be seen.
For a plate that was read badly, the photo itself helps more than any description of it. Send it only if you are comfortable doing so — it is not needed to open a ticket.
Last revised 14 September 2026.