Why do calorie tracking apps struggle with home-cooked food?

Something I've been chewing on while building in this space.

Almost every calorie tracker was designed around packaged food: scan a barcode, read a label, done. That works well for a protein bar. It falls apart the moment dinner is a plate of things cooked together.

I'm from Sri Lanka, so my test case is rice and curry — rice, dhal, a coconut sambol, a jackfruit curry, all on one plate. To log that manually you have to break it into components you never measured, find a database entry for each, and guess a portion for each. Five decisions for one dinner. Most people quit rather than do that twice a day.

The failure mode that stuck with me: a plate came back labelled "dhal" when the yellow curry was actually jackfruit. Both are yellow, both cooked in coconut milk. Even good models get that wrong, and honestly so do people.

Two questions for this forum:

1. If you cook most of your own food, do you still track it? What actually works for you?

2. For anyone who's built in nutrition: how do you handle portion estimation? It's the hardest part by far — recognising the dish is comparatively easy.

Genuinely curious what people do, not looking for validation.