Foodies, answered plainly.

Foodies is a social network for food, built as an iPhone and iPad app. You post photos or videos of food with a caption, follow the people who cook things you want to see, and like, comment on and save what they post. Every post on the network is about food. Around that sit live cook-along broadcasts, end-to-end encrypted direct messages, named collections for saving, and a Food DNA taste summary on every profile.

No, not to read it. You can open the app and browse as a guest with no sign-up at all: as a guest you can scroll the feeds, open individual posts and look at profiles. You need a free account, created with an email address, before you can post, comment, like, save into a collection, follow anyone or send a message, because each of those attaches your name to something another person sees. Guest browsing exists so you can judge the network by looking at it rather than by signing up first.

Foodies is an iOS app and runs on iPhone and iPad. You can download it from the App Store. There is no Android app and no web app; this site is a set of information pages about the app, not the app itself.

The interface is translated into 34 languages. Right-to-left languages lay out the entire interface right-to-left, navigation, buttons and alignment, not only the direction of the text, so the app reads correctly rather than looking like a mirrored English one.

No. Foodies has no scraped listings, no scores out of ten, no ranked “best of” lists and no connection to any booking system. Places are added by the members who eat at them, and you can mark one as somewhere you want to try or somewhere you have been. It is a network of people and their posts, not a directory of places. If you want to decide where to eat tonight, Foodies is the wrong app and you should use one built for that.

A post is one or more photographs, or a video, plus a caption. You pick the media from your library or capture it in the app, write what you want to say about the dish, and publish. It then appears in the Following feed of everyone who follows you and becomes eligible for the For You and Nearby feeds of people who do not.

Not as structured fields. Foodies has no ingredient, quantity, step, prep-time or servings fields, so there is no recipe database to search or scale. A recipe here is a post with a caption, written however you want to write it, which in practice is where the useful part usually lives, because how hot the pan needs to be rarely fits in a form field. For technique written out at length, the recipe guides on this site cover it in prose.

Yes. Video is a normal post type rather than a separate section of the app, so a clip sits in the same feeds as a photograph and gets liked, commented on and saved in exactly the same way. A short clip carries information a still cannot: how a sauce moves, how a dough behaves, how loudly something should be sizzling.

A like is applause, it tells the person you saw their post and it feeds into what your For You feed shows next. A save puts the post into a collection, which is a named, ordered list of your own such as “Sunday roasts” or “Things to try in Lisbon”. The two are kept separate on purpose: an archive built from likes is a record of what you approved of, not a record of what you intend to cook.

Food DNA is a summary on every profile describing the cuisines and kinds of cooking that person actually posts, saves and likes. It is derived from real activity rather than from a questionnaire filled in at sign-up. It exists to answer the question you have just before following someone, which a grid of attractive photographs does not answer: is this person cooking the kind of food I want more of?

For You is ranked from what you have engaged with, what you open, like, save and watch to the end, so a new account has something worth reading before it has followed anyone. Following is the accounts you follow, newest first, with nothing inserted and nothing reordered. Nearby shows posts from people around you, ordered by proximity and recency. You choose between the three; you are not handed one.

Posts from people near you, and nothing else. When a post is created, its coordinates are snapped to roughly a one-kilometre grid before being stored, so a post is never tied to an address or a building. Nearby then surfaces posts whose snapped coordinates fall close to yours. It answers “what are people cooking and eating in my city”. Places are a separate feature: members add the venues they eat at, and those appear on a map you can browse.

Blocking is available from a profile and from any post or comment by that account. It is mutual and total: a blocked account cannot see your posts, follow you, comment on your posts, appear in your feeds or message you, and you stop seeing them as well. Muting is the quieter alternative, it removes someone from your feed without telling them and without breaking the follow. The two are separate because most of the time you do not want a confrontation, you just want your feed to be pleasant again.

Reporting is available on posts, comments and profiles from the same menu as blocking. You choose a reason, and the report goes to us for review with the item and the reason attached. Reporting and blocking are independent, so you can do either, both, or one and then the other.

The report is queued for human review against the rules in the terms of use. Reporting does not by itself remove anything or notify the person you reported. If you also want them out of your experience immediately, block them, that takes effect at once and does not depend on the review.

Yes. Each device generates an X25519 key pair, a shared secret is derived per conversation through HKDF-SHA256, and message bodies are encrypted with ChaCha20-Poly1305. What reaches our server is ciphertext, which the server stores and forwards without being able to read it.

No. There is no key-fingerprint verification screen in the app, so you cannot compare a safety number with the other person and confirm that no key was substituted in transit. This is a real limit and it is stated here rather than buried: the encryption is genuine, and it is not the same guarantee that an app with fingerprint verification gives you.

No. Message keys are not rotated in a way that would protect past messages, so a device key compromised in the future could be used to read messages that were sent in the past. If a conversation needs that property, use a messenger built specifically for it.

Only to place posts in the Nearby feed, and only coarsely. Coordinates attached to a post are snapped to roughly one kilometre before they are stored, which is precise enough for a city-level feed and far too coarse to identify a home, a workplace or a building. There is no continuous location tracking and no map of where you have been.

Yes, in one tap from inside the app. You do not have to email support or wait in a queue. The privacy policy on this site lists what is stored and for how long.

Account deletion is one tap inside the app. It deletes the account and its content rather than deactivating or hiding it, so your posts, comments and profile go with it. Both export and deletion are in the app rather than behind a support form, because a right you have to request by email is a right with a friction tax attached.

A live cook-along is a real-time broadcast from your kitchen. Viewers join while it is running and comment in a stream you can read as you cook, and you can see a live viewer count for who is in the room at that moment. The premise is that the people watching have the same pan on the same hob, so it is a shared cooking session rather than a performance.

No. Any account can start a broadcast from inside the app, at no cost. There is no follower threshold, no application, no approval step and no Pro requirement. All you need is a phone that can see what you are cooking.

Yes, that is the point of it. Comments arrive in real time and you read them as you cook, so a question about heat or timing gets answered at the moment it matters. The waiting parts of cooking, the water coming up, the braise going nowhere for twenty minutes, are exactly where the chat earns its place, and they are the parts an edited video cuts out.

No. Foodies does not keep a stored replay of a broadcast. A live exists while it is running, together with its comment stream and viewer count, and then it is over. If you want the dish to stay on your profile, post it as a normal photo or video post as well.

The broadcaster sees a count of how many people are watching at any moment. If you comment during the broadcast, your comment carries your name in the stream in the ordinary way, so watching silently and commenting are different levels of visibility.

Yes. Downloading the app, creating an account, posting photos and video, following, liking, commenting, saving into collections, broadcasting live, watching live and sending encrypted messages all cost nothing, and nothing is metered on a free account. There is also no advertising in the feed on either tier: nothing is inserted into Following, and nothing in For You is there because someone paid for it to be.

Pro is an optional subscription that does exactly two things: it puts a verified badge on your profile, and it shows you the ten most recent people who visited your profile instead of the three a free account sees. Nothing else is behind it, not posting, not video, not any of the three feeds, not live broadcasting, not encrypted messages, not collections, and not any safety tool. There are no Pro-only filters, no extra storage and no reach boost.

Foodies Pro is an App Store subscription, so you cancel it in your Apple account subscription settings on the device, in the same place as every other iOS subscription. Cancelling stops the badge and returns the visitor list to three names. It does not remove or hide anything you have posted, saved or collected.

Profile visits are recorded and shown to the person whose profile it is: a free account sees the three most recent visitors and a Pro account sees the ten most recent. That is the only thing the record is used for, and it is the same mechanism whether you are looking or being looked at.