How Foodies works, from first open to last tap.

First open: reading without an account

You can open Foodies and read it without signing up. As a guest you can scroll the feeds, open individual posts and look at profiles. Guests cannot post, comment, like, save or send messages, because every one of those attaches your name to something another person sees. Guest browsing exists so that you judge the network by looking at it rather than by creating an account first.

Creating an account

A free account unlocks everything else: posting, liking, commenting, saving into collections, following and messaging. Downloading the app, creating the account and using every one of those features costs nothing, and there is no advertising in any feed. One optional subscription, Foodies Pro, exists; no feed, post, comment, collection, message, live broadcast or safety feature sits behind it, and if you cancel, nothing you have already posted stops working.

Posting

Posting is one screen. You choose one or more photographs, or a video, from your library or capture them in the app, write a caption, and publish. Video is a normal post type, not a separate section, so a clip sits in the same feeds as a still and is liked, commented on and saved the same way.

The post appears in the Following feed of everyone who follows you, newest first, and becomes eligible for the For You and Nearby feeds of people who do not follow you yet. If the post carries a location, its coordinates are snapped to roughly a one-kilometre grid before they are stored, so it is never tied to an address or a building.

The three feeds

Foodies has three feeds and you choose between them rather than being handed one.

• For You is ranked. It learns from what you open, like, save and watch to the end, and it exists so that a network you have just joined is worth reading before you have followed anybody.
• Following is the people you follow, newest first, with nothing inserted and nothing reordered. A follow means what it says.
• Nearby shows posts from people around you, ordered by proximity and recency. It answers “what are people cooking and eating in my city”. It is a feed of posts, not a map of venues; Foodies has no restaurant listings, reviews, ratings or bookings.

Following someone is one-directional: you follow, their posts enter your Following feed, and they are told they have a new follower. There is no request to accept. Unfollowing is immediate and silent. Each profile carries a Food DNA summary, a breakdown of the cuisines and kinds of cooking that person actually posts, saves and likes, so you can see what a follow will bring before you make it.

Liking, commenting and saving

Three actions sit under every post and they mean three different things. A like is applause; it tells the person you saw it and feeds into what For You shows you next. A comment is a public conversation under the post, which is usually where the useful part is. A save is for you: it puts the post into one of your collections, a named, ordered list such as “Sunday roasts” or “Things to try in Lisbon”. A saved post keeps its photograph, its caption and the person who cooked it, so it still makes sense months later and you can go back and ask them.

Live cook-alongs

Any account can start a live broadcast from the app. Viewers join while it is running, comment in a real-time stream you can read as you cook, and you see a live viewer count. It is built as a cook-along, on the premise that the people watching have the same pan on the same hob. Foodies keeps no replay: a live exists while it runs, and the chat with it. The live cook-along page covers how to run one.

Direct messages, encrypted end-to-end

You can message any account you can see. 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, so what the server stores and forwards is ciphertext it cannot read. Two limits are stated rather than buried: there is no key-fingerprint verification screen, so you cannot compare a safety number with the other person, and there is no forward secrecy, so a device key compromised in the future could be used to read past messages. The encryption is real, and it is not the same guarantee as a dedicated messenger.

Blocking, muting and reporting

Blocking is available from a profile and from any post or comment, and it is mutual and total: a blocked account cannot see your posts, follow you, comment, appear in your feeds or message you, and you stop seeing them. Muting removes someone from your feed without telling them and without breaking the follow. Reporting sends a post, comment or account to a human review queue with your reason attached; it does not by itself remove anything or notify the person, so if you want them out of your experience at once, block as well.

Export and deletion

Both are one tap inside the app, without writing to support. Export gives you your data. Deletion removes your account and its content rather than deactivating or hiding it. The privacy policy lists what is stored, for how long, and on what basis. The app is an iPhone and iPad app available on the App Store, translated into 34 languages including right-to-left ones, with Dynamic Type and VoiceOver throughout. There is no Android or web version.

Frequently asked questions

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