Apple's HomeView Trims Online Recipes to Bare Steps, and Recipe Writers See a Threat

That convenience is the point, and it is also the objection. The HomeView is the latest in a line of websites, browser extensions and smart home gadgets promising to reduce an online recipe to its essentials: an ingredient list, cooking instructions and timers. What such tools remove along with the scrolling is the surrounding text, and with it the display ads and affiliate links that many recipe writers depend on for income. Recipes are usually free to read but not free to create, and the tools cut off the main routes by which sites and writers recover the cost.

"Tools that just extract the recipe break apart that unspoken social contract with recipe developers and audiences," Bettina Makalintal, a senior reporter at Eater, told The Verge.

The online recipe business spans sites such as Allrecipes and NYT Cooking, which host tens of thousands of recipes each, dedicated food publications, and thousands of independent cooks publishing on blogs, newsletters, YouTube and TikTok. The introductory essays that readers often complain about serve two purposes, according to the report: they are generally the only part of a recipe page a writer can copyright, since the instructions themselves are treated as mere directions, and they exist because search engines rewarded them. "Recipe writers needed to pad out the text in a certain way so that their recipes would have a chance of coming up in a Google search," Makalintal said.

Apple's design does guarantee publishers at least one visit. A recipe must first be opened on an iPhone or through Safari on the HomeView itself before it can be loaded onto the screen, so its ads are seen once. That is worth less to site owners than the repeated impressions generated by a reader who scrolls down the page and leaves it open while cooking.

The loss may extend to cooks. Makalintal said the material around a recipe can help with problems that arise mid-cooking or with ingredient substitutions, context that simplified steps may omit. Jaya Saxena, a founder-owner of the food site Ravenous, disputed the premise that the essays are unavoidable. "Nearly every food blog has a 'jump to recipe' button right up at the top, so you don't actually have to scroll," she said. "So if you're still out here complaining about these essays, you're just an asshole."

Apple is not the first to try. The startup Recipeasly promised in 2021 to "fix" online recipes by removing ads and personal stories, and went offline within a weekend after a backlash. Larger technology companies have met less resistance: Amazon's Echo Show displays offer hands-free cooking features similar to those on the HomeView, according to The Verge.