A recipe app that reads recipes for you

What it needed to do

Most recipe apps make you type. KitchenSync is built around not typing: paste the text of a recipe from a blog or an email, photograph a cookbook page or a handwritten card, or share a link, and it becomes a structured recipe with ingredients, steps, timings and servings. The photo and link import use the Claude API; pasted text goes through a parser that runs on the phone.

Once a recipe is in, the rest of the app is about the moment you actually cook: a full-screen step-by-step mode that keeps the screen awake and remembers where you were, ingredient scaling that recalculates every quantity when you change the servings, and a shopping list that merges identical ingredients across several recipes.

What I built

• Recipe management. A full editor with ingredients, steps, tags, prep and cook times and servings. Full-text search, tag filters, favourites, duplicating and photos from the camera or gallery.
• Import from anywhere. Photo and URL import through the Claude API, with JSON-LD structured data used first for websites and the model as the fallback. A local text parser for pasted recipes.
• Cooking mode. Swipe between steps, scale servings on the fly, progress indicators, keep-awake, and a persisted session so an interrupted cook can be resumed.
• Shopping lists. Pick one or more recipes and get one consolidated list, with quantities combined and each item showing which recipes it came from.
• Allergen detection. Every ingredient is checked against a keyword database covering the 14 EU-regulated allergens. Users set which ones matter to them and see warnings on cards and detail views.
• Backup and restore. A timestamped JSON export of the whole collection, and an import with merge or replace.
• Free and Pro. Twenty recipes free with every manual feature. Pro, billed through Google Play, unlocks unlimited recipes and fifty AI imports a month.

The stack

React Native 0.81 on Expo 54 with Expo Router, TypeScript, Zustand for state with persistence, SQLite on the device for the recipe store, NativeWind for styling, react-hook-form and Zod for the forms, Jest and React Native Testing Library for the tests. Billing is react-native-iap against Google Play. The AI features call the Claude API.

Status

Live on Google Play and still being refined from real use. The screenshots above are the store listing graphics.