App Review: Allrecipes Dinner Spinner
9/10
Our Rating:
Overall: 9/10
Cost: 9/10
You can have a free account (if you choose) and the ads aren’t overly invasive. It’s a solid situation.
User Experience: 9/10
The instructions for the app and the spinner were presented simply without being annoying or requiring previous knowledge from the user.
Tools & Features: 9/10
Without making an account, your access to all the app features is limited, but even with an account, the app is pretty simple.
Setup: 9/10
As far as making an account goes, it’s just electing whether you want to use Google, Facebook, Apple, or your email. It might take some time to fully personalize the app to your needs and preferences, but that’s to be expected.
Basic App Info:
Name of the App: Allrecipes Dinner Spinner
Cost: Free
Who is it best for?
We think the Allrecipes Dinner Spinner app is best for anyone looking for an easy and extensive recipe database. The spinner feature can be totally random or manually selected (partially or entirely), so it’s really fine for pretty much everyone, regardless of whether you’re picky or more adventurous with food. Plus, the app gives you a full feed of recipes. (Note that you don’t have to make any of them if they don’t sound good to you.)
App Intro
The Allrecipes Dinner Spinner is a recipe app that caters to people with a go-with-the-flow attitude about mealtime. In addition to typical recipe-app functionality, such as a searchable database of tons of recipes, users can use the “Dinner Spinner” to get recipe suggestions based on the type of dish, ingredients, and prep time.
Here are the options for the Dinner Spinner:
It’s worth noting that there’s not a clear-cut way to have Allrecipes restrict certain ingredients and recipes from the randomized spinner results or a manual search, but, unfortunately, for those with allergies having a few extra hoops to jump through is likely par for the course.
In addition to the database and Dinner Spinner, Allrecipes offers users (even users without an account) a daily feed of suggested recipes. Users with accounts gain additional features like a shopping list and a favorites page to save recipes.
The App
Features
- My Feed
- Dinner Spinner
- Favorites
- Shopping List
Likes/Dislikes
Likes
-
The minimal UI and straightforward UX
-
Dinner Spinner feature
-
Allrecipes recipes
Disikes
-
The account exclusive features don’t do much to warrant needing an account
-
Wish there was more ability to customize (like adding the ability to customize what ingredients are included in your feed for the sake of preference or allergy)
Additional Thoughts
When you use the Dinner Spinner you might want to be pretty flexible with food, but again, you’re fed a feed of recipes and it’s pretty unlikely that absolutely nothing will sound appetizing.
App Ratings, Size, & Category
While we maintain that our experience was generally positive, it’s worth noting that the reviews on both the Google Play store and the Apple App Store are fairly mixed. A few reviews mention that there’s no longer the ability to categorize your favorites beyond newest, rating, and title on iPhone devices. Considering we didn’t experience this feature to begin with, we don’t think it’s a dealbreaker. Secondly, some reviews state that if they add or edit recipe notes, those notes disappear, which is understandably frustrating. Finally, some reviews mention that the app crashes somewhat frequently, but, again, that’s not something we noticed during our trial.
Skim through the reviews for yourself, but remember that for a free app with an extensive recipe database backed by a household brand, Allrecipes is pretty good.
RATINGS
-
3.5 / 5
-
4.2 / 5
SIZE
-
28.9 MB
-
16.43 MB
Awards & Accolades
The Bottom Line
We decided to keep this one downloaded because it gave us a unique experience compared to some of the other food/recipe apps on the market. Allrecipes excels where we want it to (recipe diversity and availability), and the Dinner Spinner is a fun feature. It’s worth a download at least. Whether or not you decide to make an account is your prerogative (and those features don’t make or break the overall experience, for what that’s worth).
Could some of the features and tech be improved? Sure, but for a free app with minimal ads, we aren’t at all perturbed by what we experienced during our trial. Plus, the developers update the app frequently to combat any user issues, which is a great sign that they aren’t going to let it fall by the wayside.
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