Regional food database support for FOSS Android calorie trackers

android app real project •• multiple requests

FOSS Android calorie trackers (OpenNutriTracker, Waistline, FoodYou) rely almost entirely on Open Food Facts and USDA FoodData Central, leaving German, Indian, Brazilian, and other non-Western users with sparse food coverage and inaccurate portion data. Multiple open GitHub issues on these projects explicitly request regional databases (German BLS, Indian INDB, Brazilian TACO/TBCA), all confirmed still unimplemented as of May 2026 by a core contributor.

builder note

Don't build another tracker front-end—build the regional food database as a standalone Kotlin library or REST API that OpenNutriTracker and Waistline can plug into, and you become shared infrastructure for the whole FOSS ecosystem without competing with anyone.

landscape (3 existing solutions)

The entire FOSS calorie tracker ecosystem has standardized on the same two databases (Open Food Facts + USDA), creating identical blind spots across all apps. Regional databases (BLS, INDB, TACO) are openly licensed—the gap is a standalone library or API layer that any FOSS app can integrate.

OpenNutriTracker USDA + Open Food Facts only; no regional database support; German, Indian, and Brazilian users report missing or wrong food entries as a persistent issue.

Waistline Primarily Open Food Facts; experienced intermittent API failures on German food lookups (issue #956, May 2026); no regional database fallback.

Cronometer Covers regional foods well but is subscription-based, closed-source, and cloud-dependent—not viable for FOSS or privacy-conscious users.

sources (2)

other https://github.com/simonoppowa/OpenNutriTracker/issues/316 "significantly improve food search quality for German-speaking users, as BLS covers typical German foods" 2026-03-18

other https://github.com/simonoppowa/OpenNutriTracker/issues/263 "This would be more helpful, I would like to contribute on the needed changes for this integration" 2025-07-23

healthnutritionfossandroidfood-database