MessHall family meal planning · Last updated August 2026
MessHall is a family meal-planning app. This page explains, plainly, what the app does with
your information. If anything here is unclear, email
draygontoo@gmail.com and ask.
Short version There's no sign-up, no email or password, no name,
no advertising, and no analytics or tracking SDKs in this app. Your family's meal-planning
data syncs between your household's devices via Firebase (Google Cloud) so everyone sees the
same list — that's what it's for.
What we collect
An anonymous device identifier. When you open the app, it signs in
anonymously with Firebase Authentication — no email, phone number, or name is requested or
collected. This identifier is just how the app recognizes "this device" for sync and
permissions purposes.
What you type into the app. Grocery list items, meals and recipes
(names, ingredients, instructions, prep/cook time), your week's meal plan, fridge contents,
custom ingredients, allergy/dietary restriction selections, and nutrition goals — all
entered by you or another member of your family.
Barcode scans. If you use the barcode scanner, the camera is used
on-device to read the barcode number, which is sent to the public
Open Food
Facts database to look up nutrition info. No photo or video is stored or uploaded —
only the scanned barcode number leaves your device, and only for that lookup.
Recipe URLs you paste in. If you import a recipe from a website, your
device fetches that page directly (checking the site's robots.txt first, and declining to
fetch pages that ask not to be scraped). The URL isn't sent anywhere except to the site
you gave us.
We don't collect your location, contacts, photos, or any advertising
identifiers, and we don't use analytics or crash-reporting SDKs that phone home usage data.
How it's used
Syncing your family's grocery list, meals, and plan in real time across everyone's
devices who has your family's join code.
Computing nutrition totals, flagging meals that contain something on your allergy list,
and suggesting meals based on what's in your fridge and your nutrition goals.
Generating an optional calendar feed (if you turn it on) so your week's planned meals
can show up in Skylight Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Calendar.
Sending local reminder notifications on your own device, if you enable them — these are
scheduled on-device and don't involve sending your data to a push notification server.
Storage & security
Your family's data is stored in Google's Firestore database, access-gated so only devices
that have joined your family (via its join code) can read or write it — enforced by
server-side security rules, not just app-side checks. A local copy is also cached on your
device for offline/fast access; on Android and iOS, that local cache is encrypted at rest
using a key held in your device's secure hardware storage (Android Keystore / iOS Keychain).
On web, the local cache isn't encrypted, since browsers don't offer an equivalent secure
enclave.
Data in transit between your device and Firebase is encrypted (HTTPS/TLS) by default.
Third parties
Firebase / Google Cloud — hosts the database, authentication, and the
backend functions this app uses (e.g. the calendar feed).
Open Food Facts — receives scanned barcode numbers for nutrition
lookups.
Recipe websites you choose to import from — receive a normal page
request when you paste in a URL, the same as visiting it in a browser.
Calendar apps (Skylight, Google, Outlook, Apple) — if you turn on the
calendar feed, whatever service you subscribe with will periodically fetch your week's
meal plan from a link you control and can revoke at any time.
We don't sell your data, and we don't share it with advertisers — there isn't
an advertising integration in this app.
Community sharing (Discover)
MessHall has an optional "Discover" feature where families can browse recipes other
families have shared. Two different things feed into it, with different defaults:
Recipes are private by default. Sharing one to Discover is an explicit
opt-in toggle you choose per recipe, and can be turned off again at any time from "My
recipes" — turning it off removes it from Discover immediately.
Custom ingredients (name and nutrition values only — e.g. "Grandma's
Sauce, 120 cal per 100g") that a family adds are automatically contributed to a shared
ingredient database, so other families searching for the same ingredient benefit from it.
This doesn't include recipes, instructions, or anything else about your family.
Nothing published to Discover is linked to your name or contact info — only to your
family's join code internally, which isn't shown to other users.
Children's privacy
MessHall isn't directed at children and isn't designed to collect information from
children. It's a household tool intended to be set up and used by adults managing meals for
their family.
Your choices & data deletion
You can delete your family's data at any time, permanently, for every device in that
family — see Delete Your Data for how, whether or not you
still have the app installed.
If this policy changes in a way that materially affects how your data is handled, we'll
update the "last updated" date above. Continued use of the app after a change means you
accept the updated policy.