FOSS nutrition tracker quarterly check-in: April 2026
Three months of work since the last roundup. What shipped, what stalled, and what to expect this quarter.
What shipped
OpenNutriTracker 1.7
Major release in March. Headline feature: the iOS app reached parity with Android. There’s now a meaningful FOSS option for iPhone users for the first time in years.
Other items:
- Custom-food import via JSON paste. Useful for power users moving from another tracker.
- Better dark-mode contrast in the chart screens.
- A new “weekly summary” screen that aggregates last seven days.
We re-tested 1.7 on the standard 30-item bench. Performance unchanged from 1.6 (still 6/10 on US-branded), but the new iOS port is a real expansion of the addressable user base.
Waistline 4.6
Two notable items:
- WebDAV sync now retries failed pushes on a backoff schedule rather than dropping them. This was a frequent issue raised on the Reddit thread; appears resolved.
- A new export format: a single-file SQLite snapshot that’s significantly faster to round-trip than the old JSON.
The Cordova UI is still the same Cordova UI. We don’t expect that to change.
OpenScale 2.5
Bluetooth scale support broadened. Two more scale models added (a Renpho variant and a Eufy that previously needed the proprietary app). Useful if you’ve held off on FOSS body-comp tracking because your scale wasn’t supported.
What stalled
Foodvore
No release in Q1. Last commit January. The maintainer indicated on the issue tracker that they’re focused on a separate project; a soft transition out of active maintenance is plausible.
If you’re using Foodvore, start dual-writing to OpenNutriTracker or Waistline. We’ll re-evaluate Foodvore at the July check-in.
GnuCal (web)
No commits in 5 months. The maintainer is responsive on email but not actively shipping. Project is functional and useful for the narrow self-hosted-web-only use case but increasingly stale.
New since the December roundup
”tracker-shell” (CLI)
A new shell-based tracker that emerged in February. About 800 lines of POSIX shell, talks to USDA FDC, stores in plain CSV. The author posted it on lobste.rs and got modest attention.
Status: ~120 stars after two months. Maintainer responsive. We’ve installed it. Honest assessment: cute, works, slower than NutriCompute for the same use case, but appealing if you want a “literally just shell” tool.
”meal-week”
A markdown-driven weekly meal-plan generator. Takes a config file with available ingredients and dietary targets, outputs a 7-day meal plan with macro accounting. Star count: ~80, December launch.
Useful if your bottleneck is meal planning rather than logging. We don’t use it daily but it’s well-built.
Q2 expectations
A few things to watch:
- OFF v3 API. The OFF team has been signalling a v3 endpoint with a cleaner shape. If it lands in Q2 it’ll affect every OFF-backed tracker. Backward-compatibility statements have been good; we expect graceful migration.
- Android 16. Permission model changes are likely to require updates from every tracker that uses camera + storage. Expect a wave of “permission-fix” releases through the second half of Q2.
- OpenNutriTracker 1.8. Per the maintainer’s roadmap, custom dashboards and a recipe-templating system. We’ll see.
Status of the apps we recommend
| App | Status | Last release | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenNutriTracker | Healthy | March 2026 | iOS shipped |
| Waistline | Healthy | March 2026 | WebDAV sync improvements |
| OpenScale | Healthy | February 2026 | New scale support |
| Foodvore | Slow → ? | January 2026 | Maintainer focus shifting elsewhere |
| GnuCal | Slow | December 2025 | Functional but stale-trending |
| NutriCompute | Healthy | January 2026 | One maintainer, steady |
| FoodSnap-Lite | Slow | February 2026 | Single small release |
Q1 in three sentences
OpenNutriTracker is no longer Android-only and that’s the most important development. Waistline’s sync got measurably more reliable. The long tail of small projects continues its usual churn — one new project per quarter that survives, two existing ones that go quiet.
What you should do this quarter
If you’ve been waiting to switch to FOSS:
- iOS user: try OpenNutriTracker now that it has parity.
- Android user not using FOSS yet: OpenNutriTracker is still the easiest first install.
- Already on FOSS: install the latest releases. The bug fixes are real.
If you’ve been using Foodvore: have an exit plan ready. Don’t be surprised in three months.