Apple’s HomeView turns recipes into steps, and writers lose their ads
Apple’s kitchen display strips recipes down to ingredients, steps and timers, and the food writers who made them lose the ads and links that pay for them.
By
Naomi Adeyemi
In brief
- Apple’s HomeView reformats online recipes into ingredient lists, steps and timers controlled by voice and Siri AI.
- The conversion drops the ads and affiliate links many recipe writers rely on for income.
- Amazon’s Echo Show works only with partner sites, and Google dropped its equivalent from Nest Hubs in 2024.
- Independent writers are moving to paywalls and newsletters, a shift that has brought subscription fatigue.
A recipe that once took a long scroll now arrives as a short checklist. That is the promise of Apple’s HomeView, and The Verge argues it comes at the expense of the people who write those recipes.
A smart display built for the messy kitchen
Apple introduced the HomeView with an unusual ad: a three-minute look at the chaotic morning of a family of five, with the display sitting on the kitchen table. In it, the device helps the family check calendars, send messages and pull up a French toast recipe with simple, step-by-step instructions.
The pitch is easy to grasp. Instead of a long page with a recipe at the bottom, the HomeView shows ingredient lists, cooking instructions and timers, all navigable hands-free with voice controls and Siri AI. It suits anyone with messy hands and no wish to touch a screen.
What the format costs the people who write recipes
Converting a recipe into Apple’s format removes its surroundings, including the ads and affiliate links that many writers depend on for income. Eater senior reporter Bettina Makalintal says: “Tools that just extract the recipe,” she says, “break apart that unspoken social contract with recipe developers and audiences.”
Apple does keep a small safeguard. To load a recipe, you must first open it on an iPhone or through Safari on the HomeView itself, so the original page and its ads are seen at least once. For site owners, though, that is worth much less than repeated impressions from someone scrolling while they cook. Apple says the feature will work with any recipe that uses Google’s search-friendly recipe formatting, which The Verge calls unique among current smart home hubs.
The chatty introductions have a history. Makalintal says that “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”. It is also usually the only part of a recipe a writer can copyright, since the rest counts as mere instructions.
For cooks: ingredients, steps and timers in one view, hands-free.
Against: advice on troubleshooting and ingredient swaps can disappear, which Makalintal says is sometimes really helpful. Some recipes may become harder to follow.
Jaya Saxena, a founder-owner of the food website Ravenous, notes that readers already have an escape route: “Nearly every food blog has a ‘jump to recipe’ button right up at the top, so you don’t actually have to scroll”.
How Apple, Amazon and Google differ
| Company | Approach to recipes |
|---|---|
| Apple HomeView | Works with any recipe using Google’s search-friendly formatting; apps such as Allrecipes or NYT Cooking can be cast to the screen on their own terms |
| Amazon Echo Show | Similar hands-free cooking, only with partner sites like Allrecipes or Epicurious |
| Google Nest Hubs | Step-by-step recipe feature removed in 2024, with other features Google called underutilized |
| Google Search | Uses Gemini AI to amalgamate recipes into a streamlined version on the results page |
Saxena sees the HomeView as “more like a continuation of the threats they’ve already seen” for established writers. Makalintal ranks it lower than AI summaries: “I would put the threat level below AI summaries”, because their sourcing is opaque and “really is erasing labor.” The Verge adds a condition: unless Apple sells vast quantities of displays, the feature will likely reach far fewer people than Google’s AI recipes.
Backlash, paywalls and subscription fatigue
Resistance has worked before, at small scale. In 2021 the startup Recipeasly promised to remove ads and life stories from recipes, and online backlash forced its founders to take it offline after barely a weekend. Bigger companies have pushed through such objections.
Independent writers have few options: live with shrinking Google traffic and ad revenue, take on sponsored content and paid recipes with big brands, or move to a paywall or newsletter model. Makalintal says smaller developers are turning to Substack, where recipes are easy to lock, but this has led to some subscription fatigue among home cooks. The author of the piece, who restricts recipes on a newsletter to paid subscribers, asked Apple how the HomeView handles paywalled recipes and had no answer at publication.
Saxena argues that the work deserves payment: “A good, creative recipe that has been tested to ensure it really works takes time and effort and money”.
Photo: cottonbro studio / Pexels
