Apple’s HomeView smart display is designed to turn online recipes into hands-free, step-by-step cooking instructions. A promotional ad shows a family using it to check calendars, send messages and open a French toast recipe.
The format strips away surrounding webpage text, including ads and affiliate links that can help recipe writers earn income. The Verge’s Dominic Preston, who says he publishes recipes in a food newsletter, writes that this raises concerns for creators whose work the device repackages. Eater senior reporter Bettina Makalintal says recipe-extraction tools break an “unspoken social contract” between developers and audiences.
Recipe pages include more than instructions. Makalintal says surrounding information can help cooks troubleshoot problems and find ingredient substitutions. Apple’s simplified steps may make some recipes easier to follow, but removing that context could make others harder.
HomeView users must first open a recipe on an iPhone or in Safari on the display, so the original site is visited and its ads can appear. Preston notes that this may bring fewer ad impressions than readers who stay on a page while cooking. Food writer Jaya Saxena says most food blogs have a “jump to recipe” button, letting readers skip introductory text.
Apple is not the first to offer this kind of feature. Amazon’s Echo Show has similar hands-free cooking tools for partner sites. Google removed step-by-step recipes from Nest Hubs in 2024. Startup Recipeasly shut down after online backlash in 2021. The source says Apple’s system is intended to work with online recipes using Google’s search-friendly recipe format.
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