Privacy Policy

Updated 28 October 2026

Hunger is a calorie tracker. This page says what it collects, where that goes, and how to remove it.

What stays on your iPhone

Your meals, their photos, your goals and your settings are stored on your iPhone, and sync through your own private iCloud so they reach your other devices and survive the one in your hand. Hunger cannot read what is in your iCloud. Hunger reads active energy, workouts and weight from Apple Health, only with your permission. If you turn on Save meals to Health, it also saves each meal's calories, protein, carbs and fat to Health, where they stay under Health's own privacy controls; turning it off offers to remove them. Health data stays on your iPhone.

Estimating a meal

Hunger estimates every meal two ways where it can. An iPhone that can run Apple Intelligence reads the photo on the device, and the photo is also sent, anonymously, to be estimated in the cloud so the two answers can be compared and mistakes caught. Every other iPhone sends it to be estimated:

• The photo goes to Hunger's server, which passes it to a third-party AI provider and gives you the answer. Hunger's server does not keep the photo.
• Hunger's server knows which account asked, because there is a daily ceiling on how much can be estimated this way — high enough that ordinary days never reach it, and there to stop one account spending the service for everyone. It keeps that count — your account and two numbers, for today and yesterday — and nothing else about the request.
• The provider is told none of that. What reaches it is the picture alone: no username, no account, no location, and none of the photo's original information. Hunger re-encodes every photo before sending it, so the camera details, the time and the place it was taken are not in what goes out.
• Everything else in the frame goes with the food. Before the first photo you send, Hunger says so and offers to let you type your meals instead.
• Hunger uses these providers' free tiers, and a free tier's terms commonly let the provider keep what is sent and train its models on it. That is the provider's decision and outside Hunger's control, which is why the app says so before your first photo goes and offers to let you type your meals instead.

A description you type instead of a photo takes the same route as the photo would.

Every estimate, whichever model made it, is then checked against the USDA's published nutrition values for the foods it found. For an estimate made on your iPhone, that means sending Hunger's server the name and weight of each food, for example "fried egg, 50 g", and nothing else: no photo, no account and no description. The server looks the foods up and sends back USDA's figures, and does not keep what it was asked.

The weekly summary never goes anywhere. It is written on your iPhone by Apple Intelligence, from a week of your own totals, and is only offered on iPhones that can run it.

Your account

Looking around Hunger needs no account. Adding meals and using the Feed need Sign in with Apple. Hunger asks Apple for no name and no email. It stores Apple's anonymous identifier for you, the username you pick, when you agreed to the Terms of Use, and a token Apple issues so that Hunger can tell Apple to forget the sign-in when you delete your account.

The Feed

When Feed sharing is on — it is on by default once you sign in, and you can turn it off in Profile or for any single meal — each photographed meal is shared publicly under your username: the photo, its title, meal type, time, calories and macros. Photos are stored with Cloudflare, Hunger's hosting provider. Hunger also stores your swipes, the posts and comments you report, and the people you block.

What Hunger does not do

No advertising, no tracking across other apps or websites, and no selling or sharing of your data with data brokers.

Counting how much Hunger is used

Hunger counts which parts of the app get used, so it can be made better: that a meal was logged and how (photo, typed, picked from the list), how long an estimate took and whether it worked, whether a meal was corrected afterwards (which kinds of change, never what was changed), water, weight and exercise being logged, which tab was opened, Feed activity such as a swipe, a comment or a report, whether a reminder was opened, how you answered the app's own questions (notifications, sending a photo to be estimated, sharing your first plate), and the VIP screen being shown, with which feature led to it and whether a purchase or restore went through. When the app comes forward it also sends a short summary of its settings: whether you are signed in and VIP, which reminders are on, whether Health has data for Hunger, whether meals go to the Feed, and roughly how many meals are logged and how long ago the app was installed, as ranges rather than exact numbers. Each count is sent to Hunger's own analytics service on Cloudflare with a random identifier the app makes for itself. That identifier is not linked to your Apple sign-in, your username or anything else about you, and the counts carry no photo, no meal text, no name and no location.

Hunger's server keeps the same kind of count for each request it handles: what kind of request it was, whether it worked, how long it took and, for an estimate, which model answered and how many foods it found, whether a sign-in created a new account, and whether a subscription report started, renewed or ended a VIP period, with no account attached.

You can turn the app's counting off at any time in Profile, under Privacy, and it stops sending and discards what was waiting. The server's counts of its own requests carry no account and cannot be switched off for one person.

Deleting your data

Deleting a meal removes its Feed post and photo from Hunger's server. Delete account in Profile removes your account, username, every shared photo and post, and your swipes, reports and blocks, and revokes the Sign in with Apple authorization. Meals on your iPhone stay until you delete them or the app. A deleted photo can remain in Cloudflare's cache for up to an hour.

Children

Hunger is not directed at children under 13, and people under 13 may not create an account.

Contact

Questions or requests: hun@ger.llc.