iOS 18.4 packs a lot of new features, but one of my top picks is the addition of tens of thousands of recipes to Apple News alongside a special cooking mode. Here’s how it works.
Apple News+ now includes massive recipe library and cooking mode
The Apple News app has come a long way from its early days, and now spans a much wider scope than news.
Apple has been regularly adding new puzzle games for News+ subscribers, and now in iOS 18.4 there’s a major new recipe and cooking feature too.
If you subscribe to Apple News+ or the Apple One Premier bundle, the News app is now host to over 70,000 recipes—and growing.
Searching for recipes on the web is often a very frustrating experience. Ad-laden sites make it hard to parse the info you actually need.
But with Apple’s new recipe experience, you get an abundance of recipes provided in a clean, distraction-free (and ad-free) interface.
Inside the Following tab in the News app, you’ll find a new Food section that includes the Recipe Catalog. Here, you can search for recipes and filter by a variety of parameters.
The app makes it easy to find what you’re looking for, whether that’s something easy, or quick to cook, a vegan dish, or something for a specific mealtime like breakfast or dinner.
Recipes can be saved to your catalog for revisiting later.
iOS 18.4 recipe experience easily bests that of the web
Every Apple News recipe is laid out in the same, predictable fashion:
- there’s a photo at the top, along with basic info like cook time and yield
- then you’ll see a full ingredients list
- finally, there are step-by-step directions
- followed by recommendations of related dishes to try
Compared to the mess of finding and following recipes on the web, the ad-free, no-frills layout in Apple News is better in every single way.
iOS 18.4 also has a special cooking mode you can use, which makes a recipe’s directions large on your screen and offers tools like tappable links to start timers.
The whole interface looks great on an iPhone or iPad, and will undoubtedly make an appearance on Apple’s forthcoming ‘HomePad’ product.
There are plenty of App Store options for recipe management, including a number of solid ones.
But Apple’s combination of a massive recipe library—that will keep growing—and a clean, beautiful interface makes iOS 18.4’s food additions my new go-to for cooking.
Have you tried iOS 18.4’s new recipe features? Let us know what you think in the comments.
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