Mela - Recipe Manager

• Free to download
• In-app purchases

Last verified 31 Jul 2026

4.7 849 ratings · App Store

1. 5/5The best recipe app

   I love this app so much. It’s clean, simple, uncluttered, and easy to navigate. It feels like this app pulls all the features I’ve loved from different apps all in one place. Seem less recipe import, measurements and amounts are bolded and highlighted in different colors, you can switch between ingredients and instructions in cook mode, see the previous/next steps (as opposed to only being able to view one step at a time), you can add timers, tag recipes, sync your grocery list with Reminders…and probably more that I can’t think of off the top of my head. However, there are some suggestions I have for minor tweaks that would make the user experience (or at least mine) more seamless. 1. It would be useful if I could select several recipes, click “edit,” and tag them appropriately without having to go through each recipe one by one. Also, when I’m viewing a recipe and click the three dots to edit it, I’m not sure why I can only add one tag or do one thing before the window disappears and I have to click on it again. This is a minor issue but gets rather tedious when you add a bunch of new recipes from a website and have to then organize them all 2. Provide a way to create a meal plan without syncing to iCal. I don’t like to clutter my calendar, and usually when I meal plan I don’t always know what day I’m going to cook what. Literally other than that, this app is 10/10 and I use it so often. It’s definitely made meal planning be less daunting now that I don’t have to check 5+ websites or sources for inspiration, it all just lives in one place

   Leezur · 31 Jul 2026

2. 5/5Fantastic!

   All you need to know is that this app removes all the personal backstory blather from recipe sites (“Want to make a corn muffin? First, here’s 4,000 words about my experience on 9/11…”) and leaves you with a clean copy of what you were looking for in the first place. From there, you have all manner of customization and sync options if you want, but the basic task of scraping and delivering a usable recipe from your basic, awful, SEO-tilted-template recipe site is incredibly accurate, quick, and consistent. I do not miss the newsletter interstitial popups. I celebrate their absence. It’s been a long time since an app was so good I actually looked forward to rooting through all my old notes and bookmarks to populate it. Mela is that app, and it’s actually been fun to see all the insanely different stuff I saved over the years come together in a single, sensible presentation. Nice touches abound (keep-awake on iPad is great). There is of course room for refinement (“select all” and “select none” buttons when adding groceries would be nice), and the app doesn’t save your place when you switch to another app, but these are nice-to-haves. The dev is great, so I expect these kinds of rough edges will get dealt with. On that note, if you’re into RSS news feeds, check out Reeder by the same dev, also best in category, imo.

   Unpainted Huffhines · 31 Jul 2026

3. 5/5Two more things, and it’s perfect.

   Ok I’ve never done this before so I don’t know how long it’ll take before this feedback reachers developers. But great app. 10/10. I could get into the details, but the sample photos and other reviews do all that. I just have two suggestions that I really want to see added in the near future One, get a better sorting system. All, want to cook and Favorites is just ridiculous considering how file management is handled these days. Allow us to create folders and that fixes this completely. I want to have all my bakery stuff in one place, breakfast stuff in one place, chicken stuff in one place, you get the point. It’s honestly more impressive that this isn’t already included by default but enough complaining you get the point. Two, something I think would be cool is to have the ingredients for each step automatically highlighted instead of having to do it manually. I find myself deselecting everything, and then manually highlighting the step ingredients when I get to each step. When I saw one of the sample photos showcasing this feature I got excited because I thought it was an automatic thing but guess not.

   mrdokun · 31 Jul 2026

4. 3/5A great start, but some features fall short.

   This app has a lovely interface and is very user friendly in the browse and feeds features and it scrapes recipes from the Internet flawlessly. However there are some quirks that are big drawbacks and make some of the features impractical. 1) recipe categories- I don’t believe there is a way to edit all of the categories you create. When creating a new recipe you can only add a category by typing in the name and then categories you have previously created will show up above it, in the same format as spell check does. You also create new categories this way. If you accidentally create a duplicate category, there is no screen you can go to to edit all the categories and delete ones you don’t need. 2) The feature for creating a new recipe by taking a picture of a hard copy is not usable. When you scan the photo, you are instructed to select the text and choose a type of text. So you drag a box around the ingredients, for example, and select ingredients from the drop down. I could not find a way to do a second selection and choose a different text type as well for, say, the instructions. So, you continue to the next step and it uploads only the ingredients. I then looked for another option to take a new photo and upload the instructions or the title, but there is no way to do that. Essentially, if you want to scan a recipe in you can only scan in either the title, ingredients, or the instructions. You can’t upload all 3, which makes it unusable without manually entering a significant amount of text. If these features could be fixed, this would be the best app of its kind.

   Jo4191 · 31 Jul 2026

5. 5/5Finally the recipe manager I was looking for

   I finally found the app I was looking for. Mela allowed me to combine recipes that used to be spread across four different apps. I can now access all those recipes in one place with a consistent, clean and modern interface. I used to store recipes in Trello, Instapaper, and the NYT cooking and How to Cook Everything apps. Mela made it incredibly easy to import all those recipes, and I was completely done in only a couple hours. Importing web-based recipes via the built in browser was seamless (including NYT cooking). And even for my non-web based How to Cook Everything recipes, I was impressed by the efficient parsing that easily recognized pasted lists of ingredients and steps, and automatically formatted those sections. The RSS-based feed is just icing on the cake, and I look forward to discovering new recipes from a variety of sources within the app. I expected a lot from the developer of Reeder (which I have used every day for countless years) and I was not disappointed. Highly recommended to anyone looking to consolidate and access their recipes in a single and modern app.

   Touf41 · 31 Jul 2026

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