Where you ate it: a meal in slotho can carry a place

Since 26.4, a meal in slotho can say where you ate it. Type a place, or pick one of the cafés and restaurants around you, and the name goes into Apple Health with the meal. Come back to the same café later and slotho remembers what you had there.

The feature is small. What is worth writing down is where each piece of it goes, because a place is the most personal thing a food log has ever asked for, and we did not want it to end up anywhere by accident.

Where to find it

Add a food to the meal first: the row belongs to the meal, so it appears once there is something on the plate. A Where row then sits under When in the meal list. It reads Add a place until you choose one, and then the place itself — Thai Orchid · Restaurant. Tap it and a sheet opens with a field to type any name you like and a button, Find places near me.

It is free, and it is on by default. Settings → Food & Drink → Suggest places when logging a meal turns it off, and off means the row disappears and slotho sets up no location machinery for your food at all.

Three destinations, three different things

Apple Health gets the place’s name, its Maps category, and — when the place came from Maps — the venue’s identifier. That is where you said you were, stored with the meal like every other detail of it. Other apps you have allowed to read your dietary data can see what the meal carries — that name, category and identifier. They never see your location, because no coordinate is written to Health.

Your iPhone keeps the coordinates. They live in a small ledger in slotho’s own storage — up to 200 places, each with the last five things you logged there — and they travel only where the rest of your data does, in your own device backup. That ledger is what lets slotho notice you are within about 100 metres of somewhere you have eaten before — once it has a position, from a photo or from the button. The sheet then shows You’ve been here and what you logged there last time, so you can add it again in a tap. A coordinate is recorded only for a meal you attached a place to. It is not a history of where you go.

Apple Maps gets a coordinate, only when you ask. To list the venues around you, slotho sends Maps a point and asks for the ten nearest food places within 250 metres — restaurants, cafés, bakeries, food markets, breweries, wineries and distilleries. Maps is sent the coordinate, never the meal. That happens when you tap Find places near me, or when you open the Where sheet on a meal logged from a photo that carries its own location. Nothing is looked up before that.

When it asks for your location

Once, and only from that button. Find places near me is the one control in slotho’s food logging that ever asks for your location, and before iOS asks, slotho says why — what it looks for and what it keeps. Decline and the field still works: type the name and the meal carries it all the same.

If Precise Location is off for slotho, the sheet says so instead of searching around an approximate position. And if Maps cannot be reached, the sheet says Couldn’t reach Maps — the field still works then too.

What we are not claiming

slotho does not know what the place serves. Maps returns a category, never a cuisine or a menu, so the place is a label on your meal and nothing more. It does not track your movements, and a place goes nowhere you did not send it: into Health as a name, and to Apple Maps as a coordinate when you ask what is nearby.

slotho supports general wellness. It is not a medical device.