Ingrai

I'm building IngrAI, an Android app that scans a food barcode and shows the full ingredient list. It flags anything matching ingredients you've set to avoid, and tells you if the product has an active FDA recall. No health score, no "this is good or bad for you." It shows what's on the label and what the FDA says.

I ran the closed test properly. 12 real testers, friends and people from my community, opted in for the full 14 days. Applied for production. Rejected, "your app requires more testing."

Worth knowing why if you're about to hit this yourself. The 12 tester bar isn't the real gate. Google also looks at engagement, and mine installed it, tried it a few times, then drifted. That's mostly on me. Product search was broken for most of the test window, so there wasn't much reason to keep opening it. That's fixed now, along with a bug where every scanned product got wrongly flagged as having incomplete data.

It's also why I'm not buying testers. There's a market of $20 to $40 services that supply 12 opt-ins. They fix the number and make the actual problem worse, because Google is measuring whether people use the thing.