by Jason Snell

HomeView versus Recipe Blog SEO

Apple’s new HomeView sure seems like a good fit for the kitchen, which is why the company’s press releases, demos, and ads seem to lean into the idea that you’ll be cooking with the little guy.

But is there an ugly side to all that convenience? Here’s Dominic Preston, writing for The Verge:

The HomeView is just the latest in a long line of websites, browser extensions, and smart home gadgets with the same promise: that it can take an online recipe and strip it down to the essentials…. There’s only one group of people likely to object: the food writers who created those recipes in the first place.

So wait a second. Apple building a product that gets past all the garbage that loads up recipe sites—not just the ads but the endless, meandering bad writing that exists because search engines apparently demanded it—to get to the actual ingredients and make their users’ lives better, is a problem because it might hurt the livelihood of the people who create those user-hostile websites?

Did… a recipe blogger write this?

I would know, since I’m one of them — I have my own food newsletter where I occasionally publish recipes, so I have a little skin in the game.

Oh. I see.

My recipe app of choice is Mela, which (like many recipe apps) already has a feature that grabs the details from a web recipe while avoiding the SEO garbage. With HomeView, Apple is doing the same thing. I approve.

Of course, as a 21st-century media professional, I feel for the recipe writers who got jerked around by Google and are now reaping the consequences. Preston mentions that a lot of professional recipe sources are now moving to subscription models, and I think that’s a positive development, whether you’re the New York Times or a small content creator with a paid newsletter.

One of my big concerns about the HomeView is that it doesn’t seem to have any facility to support recipe apps. It would probably be a perfect device for an extension of Mela or Paprika, but they’re not CarPlay audio/video apps.

I hope Apple can find a way to allow users to bring their personal recipe catalogs onto the device in the future. In the meantime, if I were the developer of a recipe app, I’d be looking into creating a web version, to be loaded in HomeView’s included Safari browser.