What's New in v0.9.6: Gym Presence, Squads, and Barcode Lookup

v0.9.6, Cookrange’s current internal alpha build, shipped three changes at once — and all three answer different faces of the same problem: why a solo goal quietly gets abandoned, why the decision to go to the gym keeps sliding to “tomorrow,” and why scanning a barcode in Turkey so often ends on a “not found” screen. The changelog lists these as three separate lines; this post explains the “why” behind each one.

Why ship all three in the same release?

A changelog usually answers “what”: which feature got added, which bug got fixed. What these three changes share is that each targets the exact moment a behavior breaks down: gym presence targets the “should I go” hesitation, streak squads target a lone goal quietly falling apart with nobody noticing, and better barcode coverage targets a log entry stalling out on a “not found” screen. None of the three is a cosmetic UI addition — each is an intervention at the single point where an existing flow is most often abandoned.

Gym presence: a mutual friend’s check-in is now visible in real time

The first line in the changelog is specific: when a mutual, confirmed friend checks into the gym, that now reaches the other person as a real-time notification. The problem it addresses is that the decision to go to the gym usually shifts not because of a generic reminder, but because of a concrete social signal — a “today’s your training day” push notifies you of an abstract task, while “Deniz is there right now” hands you a familiar, verifiable fact. The research and design behind this mechanism is covered in why seeing a friend at the gym gets you moving; what v0.9.6 adds is that the idea is no longer theoretical — it’s a notification that actually fires.

Streak squads: your friends’ streaks are visible side by side

The second line adds a new layer on top of the squad mechanic: a group — there’s no cap on how many people can join — where every member’s own streak is visible to the rest of the group, side by side. The problem being solved is that a streak kept entirely alone can break silently the moment a single day gets skipped, with nobody around to notice. In a squad, that same gap becomes visible to everyone else, even though each person’s streak stays their own and is counted separately — it isn’t a shared or pooled streak. It isn’t an extra reminder notification bolted on top — it’s the shared visibility itself doing the work. The research behind why accountability partnerships hold up is covered in why accountability partners make streaks stick; what v0.9.6 adds is that mechanism actually running, for real, in a group anyone can join with a 6-character invite code.

Barcode lookups: still Open Food Facts, still growing

The third line is easy to misread as a new proprietary database — it isn’t. Barcode scanning in Cookrange has always run against Open Food Facts, the same global, crowd-sourced product database used well beyond Cookrange. Speed was never really the problem here — the problem was that database failing to recognize a local or regional brand, or a grocery chain’s own house-label product, and the user hitting a “not found” screen as a result. That screen, not scan speed, is what actually breaks the logging habit, even when the camera opens in a couple of seconds flat. Why database quality matters more than scan speed is covered in more depth in barcode food logging: database quality matters more than scan speed.

What problem each change actually solves

Feature	Problem it solves	How it works
Gym presence	The “should I go” decision staying stuck in the abstract	Real-time alert when a mutual friend checks in
Streak squads	A solo streak breaking with nobody noticing	Uncapped group, each member’s own streak visible to all
Barcode lookups	Local products routinely coming back “not found”	Same global Open Food Facts database, growing via user contributions

Why tell this as a story instead of just a changelog?

A raw changelog lists what changed — enough to know a feature exists, but not enough to decide whether it’s actually relevant to you. The “why” — which quiet failure point it’s aimed at — makes that call much faster. If you never go to the gym with friends, gym presence may not matter much to you; if you struggle to keep a streak on your own, the squad mechanic is a direct answer to that specific problem.

What’s next

Cookrange is currently at v0.9.6, internal alpha — meaning it’s available to a limited set of users through the waitlist rather than the public app stores. These three changes mark the starting point for public changelog tracking; earlier internal builds weren’t logged retroactively. Future releases will show up on the same changelog page, and the full feature set is listed on the features page.

Frequently asked questions

Is the gym presence alert only shared between mutual friends? Yes — the design deliberately limits this to confirmed, mutual friendships. Someone who goes to the same gym but isn’t a friend isn’t part of this signal; that boundary matters both for privacy and for keeping the signal meaningful.

Is there a limit to how many people can join a squad? No — a squad can grow as large as the group wants; there’s no member cap. What matters more than size is that every member’s own streak stays visible to the rest of the group, so accountability comes from that shared visibility rather than from keeping the group small.

Does barcode scanning use a database built specifically for Turkey? No — it queries Open Food Facts, the same global, crowd-sourced database used far beyond Cookrange. Whether a specific product — Turkish or otherwise — turns up depends on whether someone has already contributed it, not on a separate country-specific dataset.

Where to start

The three lines in v0.9.6 aren’t three unrelated feature experiments — they’re the same problem, a behavior quietly getting dropped, answered in three different contexts. Joining the waitlist is the way to try these changes early.