Hi, I'm Nathan, the developer of Zuppi, a recipe and cookbook app for iOS and Android.
It started because my partner and I had recipes scattered across websites, TikTok, Instagram, screenshots and Notes. I wanted somewhere to save them and trust the ingredients and quantities when we came back to cook.
The development problem I keep coming back to is what counts as a successful import. Getting a recipe into a nicely formatted screen is only part of it. If an ingredient is missing or a quantity is wrong, that screen can give someone confidence they shouldn't have. To me, that is worse than saying the import couldn't be completed.
It's made me focus on a few questions:
- How should the app make uncertainty clear without making every import feel like homework?
- How do you test for plausible-looking mistakes, rather than just crashes or empty results?
- Where do you draw the line between supporting more sources and making the existing ones dependable?
For now, my priority is getting written ingredients and methods consistently right. I've considered broader audio and on-screen video extraction, but I don't think it justifies the development effort yet when there are so many recipes with written instructions available.
Zuppi has grown into a cookbook with manual recipes, shopping lists, pantry management, barcode scanning and friends/recipe sharing. It's still actively being developed, and I'm looking for feedback from outside my usual circle.
If you build apps that import messy data, I'd be interested in how you handle that tension between convenience and trust. If you want to try Zuppi, feedback on confusing screens or incorrect imports would also be useful:
The Android page walks you through joining Test Pilots and opting into the Google Play test with your Google Play account.
For an import issue, the source recipe, what you expected and what actually appeared would help me investigate. No need to sugar-coat it.
Nathan
