Morsel

A calorie counter that works offline

Short answer

Morsel works completely offline: the food database, barcode scanning, search, logging, goals, history and charts all run on the phone with no connection. About 8,000 generic foods with household portions and 400,000 branded products with barcodes ship inside the app, and your diary is stored in a local database that is never uploaded.

Open most calorie counters in a basement gym, on a plane or on a trail and search stops working. The food database lives on the company’s server; the app is a window onto it. That design is also why those apps need an account, and why they charge monthly.

Morsel was built the other way round: the database is shipped inside the app, updated with each release, and the app never needs to phone home. This is what that makes possible and what it costs.

Morsel search results for “chicken breast”, served from the database on the phone

What works offline

Everything. There is no “offline mode” because there is no online mode to fall back from.

  1. Search as you type across the whole bundled database, with generic foods ranked first.
  2. Barcode scanning against about 400,000 branded products, resolved on the phone.
  3. Portions, logging, editing past days, custom foods, recipes and saved meals.
  4. The goal calculator, trend charts, weight log and CSV export.
  5. Purchasing and restoring the unlock — the one thing that needs a connection, and only at that moment, because it is the App Store talking to Apple.

What it costs: about 60 MB

The database is around 60 MB inside the app download. That is the whole trade: a one-time download instead of a server. The bundle is built from USDA FoodData Central (generic foods, public domain) and Open Food Facts (branded products, Open Database License), keeping the products with complete calorie and macro data and ranking them by popularity so the most-scanned items are always included. New builds ship with app updates.

A bundled database is also why Morsel can have no account and promise that nothing you log leaves your phone: there is simply no server for it to reach. The only network traffic in the app is the App Store purchase and an anonymous crash report if something breaks.

What about foods that aren’t bundled?

A miss in search or in the scanner flows straight into a custom food: name and calories are enough, the scanned barcode is attached automatically, and the entry is logged the moment you save it. Your own foods are searched and scanned alongside the bundled ones, so a product you add is found instantly next time — offline, like everything else.

Questions people ask

Does Morsel ever sync or upload my diary?
No. There is no account and no server. Your diary is in a local database on the phone, included in your normal iPhone backups. CSV export (in the unlock) is there if you want a copy.
How big is the app?
The bundled database is about 60 MB; the app as a whole is comfortably under 150 MB.
How does the database get updated?
It is rebuilt from the open sources for each release and ships with the app update. There is nothing to download separately.

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