Last updated: August 24, 2026
Onigiri is a calorie, nutrition, and water tracker for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. It is built so that your data stays yours.
With your permission, Onigiri reads and writes Apple Health (HealthKit) data: dietary energy, nutrients, sodium, water, body weight, and energy burned. It also reads, but never writes, your height, date of birth, and biological sex — used only to estimate your resting burn, which is the baseline your daily calorie budget is built on, and only on your device. This data is stored by Apple Health on your device and synced between your devices by Apple, under Apple’s protections. Onigiri never transmits Health data anywhere, never shares it with third parties, and never uses it for advertising or research. Deleting the app leaves your Health data intact in Apple Health; you can also revoke Onigiri’s access at any time in the Health app (Profile → Apps → Onigiri).
Online lookups are off by default — with them off, food search uses only your saved library and the scanner reads nutrition labels on-device. When you turn them on (onboarding or Settings → Online Database), searching or scanning a barcode sends only the search text or barcode to one of two public services, per your Settings:
These requests include no Health data, no identity, and no identifiers beyond your device’s network address, which every internet request carries. Each service’s own privacy policy governs what it does with queries it receives.
Onigiri can read a nutrition page, a PDF, an image, or a link you hand it through the iOS share sheet. It reads only what you share, when you share it — it does not watch your browsing, your clipboard, or your photo library.
One case reaches the network: if what you share is a link, Onigiri fetches that address so it has something to read. The request goes to the site you chose and nowhere else, carries no Health data and no identity, and happens only for a link you shared yourself. A page, PDF, or image shared directly is read on your device without any request.
Shared documents are read into a scratch copy that is deleted when the read finishes. Nothing is kept but a food you actually save or log.
Onigiri’s AI features — food estimates, meal-name suggestions, nutrition-label reading, reading a sign or a menu, Identify Food, and refining an estimate with a note you write — are off by default. Nothing AI-related runs until you turn the switch on in Settings → AI. When you do, they run on-device through Apple Intelligence on devices that support it — on that setting, no data is sent to third parties and everything remains on your iPhone.
Two of these features are hybrids with an on-device first stage that runs no matter which provider you pick: nutrition labels are read by Apple’s on-device text recognition first, and the AI only fills in values the local reader missed; food photos are screened by Apple’s on-device image classifier before anything is identified. Barcode scans never use AI at all. With the default Apple Intelligence engine, every stage stays on the phone.
In Settings you can instead bring your own AI provider. When you do, those features send only the text you typed, the note you wrote to refine an estimate, the label or menu transcript being read, or the photo being identified to the provider you configured, under your own API key:
API keys are stored in the device Keychain, are never included in backups or library exports, and are sent only to their own provider. These requests carry no Health data and no identity. Each provider’s own privacy policy governs what it does with the content it receives. AI providers are off unless you configure one — deleting the provider’s key or switching back to Apple Intelligence stops all AI traffic immediately.
If the provider you chose can’t be reached — no signal, or a temporary outage on their end — Onigiri estimates on your iPhone with Apple Intelligence instead, and nothing leaves the device for that request. This only ever sends less, never more. Settings → AI → Fall back to Apple Intelligence turns it off, in which case the estimate is simply skipped.
Your food and meal library, goals, and preferences are stored locally (and shared with the app’s own widgets and watch app). Library backups are saved to the app’s Documents folder under your control, visible in the Files app. Nothing is uploaded.
Onigiri collects no data. There are no analytics or crash-reporting SDKs, no advertising identifiers, and no tracking.
Calorie budgets, deficit targets, and weight projections are informational estimates computed from your own numbers. They are not medical advice. Consult a qualified professional before making significant changes to your diet or exercise.
Questions or concerns: open an issue on the project repository.
Material changes to this policy will be noted in the app’s release notes and on this page.