When Apple revealed HomeView to the world, it did so with an unusual announcement for the company: Instead of pristine, polished technology in immaculate rooms, it’s a three-minute look at the messy, frenetic morning routine of a family of five. Apple’s new smart display sits at the center of the kitchen table chaos, helping the family check their calendars, send messages, and whip up a French toast recipe in seconds, with simple step-by-step instructions.
HomeView is just the latest in a long line of websites, browser extensions, and smart home devices with the same promise: that you can take an online recipe and boil it down to its essentials. Instead of scrolling through a lengthy web page that can range from helpful cooking instructions to seemingly irrelevant personal anecdotes, with the recipe itself at the bottom, you simply get ingredient lists, cooking instructions, and timers, all hands-free navigable with voice controls and Siri AI. No distractions, no unnecessary text, and no need to deal with a touchscreen while wrist-deep in a chicken carcass. The appeal is obvious.
There’s only one group of people who are likely to object: the food writers who created those recipes in the first place. You’d know, since I’m one of them: I have my own food newsletter where I occasionally post recipes, so I have some skin in the game. The problem is that turning a recipe into easy-to-follow instructions in Apple’s own format also strips it of its context, including the ads and affiliate links that many recipe writers rely on for their income. Recipes may often be free to read, but they are not free to create, and solutions like Apple’s eliminate the main ways that websites and writers recoup those costs. “Tools that simply extract the recipe” Eater Senior reporter Bettina Makalintal says, “it breaks that unspoken social contract with recipe developers and the public.”
The online recipe landscape is a diverse place. Giants like Allrecipes and NYT Cooking host tens of thousands of recipes each, some from professional chefs and others from home cooks. Countless dedicated food publications publish original recipe content, and thousands of independent chefs produce their own on blogs, newsletters, YouTube accounts, and TikTok pages. While much of what is written on a recipe page can get on the nerves of budding cooks (we’ve all heard the jokes about being forced to read someone’s grandmother’s life story before getting to her cookie recipe), it’s there for a reason. For one thing, it’s usually the only part of a recipe that a writer can copyright; the rest are considered mere instructions. But that extra writing is also there because before they worked so hard to remove the text, big tech companies insisted on it. “Recipe writers needed to fill the text in a certain way so that their recipes would have a chance of showing up in a Google search,” explains Makalintal.
The good news for recipe writers is that Apple’s approach guarantees at least one visit to its original website. To load a recipe on the HomeView screen, you must first open it on your iPhone or through Safari on HomeView itself, making sure to see its ads at least once. That’s welcome, but for website owners it’s still much less valuable than the repeated ad impressions that come from someone scrolling down the page and staying on it while they cook.
“Almost every food blog has a ‘go to recipe’ button right at the top, so you don’t have to scroll. So if you’re still here complaining about these essays, you’re just an idiot.”
— Jaya Saxena
It’s not just bad for writers, either: readers and home cooks may be missing out, too. “Additional information about recipes can sometimes be very helpful when it comes to troubleshooting problems that might arise when cooking or addressing things like ingredient changes,” says Makalintal. Apple’s simplified steps may make some recipes easier to follow, but others may become more difficult without including crucial context elsewhere on the page.
And as common as complaints about recipe introductions are, they’ve long been easy to skip if you really insist. “Almost all food blogs have a recipe button at the top, so there is no need to scroll,” says Jaya Saxena, one of the founders and owners of the food website. Voracious. “So if you’re still here complaining about these trials, you’re nothing more than an asshole.”
Apple is far from the first company to try to optimize online recipes. In 2021, startup Recipeasly promised to “fix” online recipes by removing ads and “life stories.” It barely lasted a weekend before online backlash forced its founders to pull the plug. The largest technology companies have been able to overcome that resistance. Amazon’s Echo Show displays offer hands-free cooking features similar to HomeView, though only with partner sites like Allrecipes or Epicurious. Google’s Nest Hubs used to do this too, although Google eventually removed the step-by-step recipes feature from its Nest Hubs in 2024, along with other “underused” features. Apple’s approach, which it says will work with any online recipe that uses Google’s search-friendly recipe format, is unique among current smart home hubs. Perhaps most egregious of all, Google Search now uses Gemini AI to merge online recipes, presenting a simplified version directly on the search page, saving users from having to click through to the original sources.
Saxena says that for established writers, this is “more of a continuation of the threats they’ve already seen.” Unless Apple sells large numbers of HomeView displays, its recipes feature is likely to be used by far fewer people than Google’s AI search recipes, much less the recipes from other AI assistants and tools, which are also more egregious in the way they leverage online content. “I would put the threat level below the AI briefs,” Makalintal says, because their “opaque” sourcing is “really eliminating labor.”
Some major recipe platforms could reduce the impact if incorporated. While HomeView doesn’t have its own app store, it supports streaming apps to the screen using the same technology as CarPlay. That means big apps like Allrecipes or NYT Cooking will have the option to present content in HomeView on their own terms. It’s unlikely that freelance writers will be able to do the same. For them, the choice has remained the same for some time: ride out Google’s dwindling traffic and advertising revenue; take on more sponsored content and paid recipes with big brands; or move to a paywall or newsletter business model.
Smaller recipe developers are turning to Substack, Makalintal says, where it’s easy to lock recipes behind a paywall. I’m one of them: In my newsletter I restrict my recipes to paid subscribers, a reflection of the fact that they are the most time-consuming articles I publish. I asked Apple how the HomeView recipe tool will handle paid recipes, but did not get a response at the time of publication. But the massive move to newsletter platforms “has led to some fatigue among home cooks,” Makalintal says, and few cooks will start a paid subscription to access a single recipe, suggesting it’s not likely to support the entire industry.
However, some version of paid content may be the only answer going forward for creators both large and small. Tech companies like Apple will have to deal with how their tools work when accessing free content becomes more complicated, and the rest of us may have to get used to paying for prescriptions again.
“A good, creative recipe that has been tested to ensure it really works takes time, effort and money,” says Saxena. “It’s a real skill to communicate how something is made when you’re not physically with that person, and buying all the ingredients needed to try things multiple times is expensive. People should probably feel more comfortable paying for that.”
