What Is the Foodie App?

This app signals when it's horizontal—but otherwise, it's just a camera app

Food plated nicely on table
Brad Puet
by Brad Puet
Has written for the Huffington Post and other outlets about music and photography. His commercial photography has appeared in the Washington Post, VICE, and Slate.
Updated October 05, 2019

The Foodie app, originally developed by Line, is now owned and managed by Snow, Inc. Once upon a time, Foodie brought a bit of value to people eager to snap their meals. Now? Not so much.

Foodie is available for iOS.

What We Like

  • Free app.

  • Simple to use.

What We Don't Like

  • Editing features are less robust than what iOS offers.

  • Requires unnecessary permission grants to use.

Foodie is fundamentally a camera app. It offers a handful of onboard filters, but they're not as full-featured as you get even with standard iOS tools. The ly material benefit is that the photo frame flashes yellow when it's optimally placed to take a picture of your meal. But it doesn't achieve this goal through complex image-recognition. Instead, it's tied to the onboard gyroscope. When the phone's perfectly level, it flashes. Thus, you could take a picture of the tiles on your kitchen floor with it.

Foodie app picture of vegetables
Foodie app picture of vegetables

Foodie doesn't link to any social networks or offer value-add features that might warrant using it over the iOS Camera app, or your Snap or Instagram cameras for that matter.

In addition, the app requests location, camera, and photo-library access; the terms-of-service note that location data transmits back to the company's servers.

Our verdict? If you'd find utility in a camera app that signals when it's horizontal, you might get some value out of it. Otherwise, skip it.