> The user starts out by simplifying the problem a bit by identifying the category of the item to be examined—it’s not “What fruit is this,” but, “This is an ap

> The user starts out by simplifying the problem a bit by identifying the category of the item to be examined—it’s not “What fruit is this,” but, “This is an apple, is it any good?” Consumer Physics’ cloud-based software then taps into its knowledge base, for an apple, it defines “good” as “sweet” (hence the Brix measurement), and considers an apple’s typical range of sweetness based on thousands of scans. A graphic on the phone then places the apple on a quality range. The important data and algorithms are held in their servers, not in the phone app. This gives them a lot of control and responsibility over the models, leading me to believe that they wouldn't store data on illegal drugs. I also feel it's kind of scummy to keep this on the server. There is no reason that this functionality couldn't be offline and on the phone, except to let them charge you monthly for the hardware you're effectively leasing from them, rather than letting you use the device you own. Also, I expect if this does take off that someone will replace their app's phone home behavior and sever-side components with an equivalent on localhost. Slightly later will be the cloned scanners that plug into the app. They should focus on providing higher-quality and higher-accuracy scanners than competition can achieve, rather than trying to lock out competitors.