I’ve been using an iPhone 14 Plus as my dev and testing device lately, and the thing is kind of funny. It’s a perfectly good phone. Three years old, not ancient by any measure. But you can really see how far Apple has let it drift behind on anything modern.
Siri is still dumb. I can’t customize anything. For a three-year-old phone it somehow feels like something from 20 years ago, and that hits even harder coming from Android, where I can swap out the assistant, pick which one actually runs, and have Gemini do agentic stuff for me (soon!). The phone does things on my behalf. The iPhone? None of that. It all just passes it by.
And it’s not like it’s a bad phone. I could drop a SIM in it tomorrow and daily-drive it without thinking twice. But ever since I switched to Android, a lot of the iOS stuff just quietly annoys me now.
I’ve been weighing myself every morning for most of this year. The number goes up. The number goes down. I want it to go down more often than up. That’s basically the whole story.
To do that consistently, I need to know what I’m eating. And every calorie tracker I tried felt like it was designed for someone with more patience than me – apps with onboarding flows, dashboards, paywalls, ten taps to log a banana.
I just wanted to type “two eggs and toast” and be done. Or take a pic. Or dictate!
So I built it.
What it is
BiteNote is a calorie and macro tracker that lives inside Telegram. You message @bitenotebot the way you’d message a friend:
two scrambled eggs, slice of rye bread, black coffee
It figures out the food, estimates calories and macros, logs it, and shows you where you are for the day. No app to install. No account to create. No dashboard to visit. The conversation is the interface.
Behind the scene it either checks the database or tries to get estimates from gemini. It might be wrong! But also when I’m trying to eyeball calories I might be wrong too, so it’s guess is as good as mine (probably better though).
The problem I was actually trying to solve
The problem isn’t that calorie trackers don’t exist. There are dozens. The problem is the friction between deciding to log a meal and the meal being logged.
If logging takes 30 seconds, I do it. If it takes 90 seconds and three taps, I skip it, then skip the next one, then stop opening the app for a week. And then suddenly I find myself with gaps in my logging and then I drop the app and weight goes up because I’m like this.
Telegram solves this for me because:
It’s already on my home screen.
I’m already in it ten times a day.
Typing a sentence is faster than navigating any UI.
An LLM on the other end can parse “kanapka z serem i pomidorem (cheese and tomato sandwich but in Polish)” without me picking from a dropdown.
Why
Two reasons.
One – I wanted it for myself. I’m 94kg, I want to be lighter, and I know the only reliable way to do that is to keep food intake honest with myself. Nothing on the market made that easy enough that I’d stick with it for more than two weeks. And I have tried MacroFactor for the last couple months!
Two – I wanted to see if a chat-native product could replace an app-native one. I’m a PM by day. I spend a lot of time thinking about what AI changes about the shape of products. BiteNote is my own answer: for a category like food logging, the app is (?) the wrong unit. The conversation is the right unit.
It started as a weekend project. Then someone paid for it. Then a few more people did. So now it’s a thing.
Also, all (or most) of us have some kind of chat-interfaced AI’s that we use everyday, so using the same interface felt right.
What’s there now
Natural-language meal logging,
Daily totals, macros, weight tracking,
Photo logging — send a picture, get an estimate,
Restaurant menu lookups,
A free tier that’s actually usable, and a Pro tier for people who want history and integrations (there’s Withings integration and API access!).
I’m building this in the open (or this blogpost is actually a start of that), slowly, on the side. The roadmap is whatever annoys me most when I’m using it. Right now that’s better weekly summaries and tighter integration with the scale data I already pull from Withings.
If you try it and something breaks or feels stupid – let me know!
I made a calorie counter on Telegram. Why on Telegram? Cause I’m on Telegram most of the time, so I didn’t want to have another app. I just wanted to use chat/pictures/voice notes.
If you think this is something that might be interesting to you: bitenote.eu
And if you want to check it for a longer time, here’s a promo code that will get you 2 weeks of pro time: FEDIRULES
I have an iPhone I’m using to test iOS apps and it’s a very old iPhone 11 Pro. It’s so old, I can see the battery percentage going down in real time 😂👌
