Food & coffee September 2026

5 apps for the iPad that lives in the kitchen

An iPad in the kitchen gets used with wet hands, from across the counter, halfway through something else. These five suit that: the recipe on the screen and the plan for the week behind it, music you can read from the stove, the grocery list the whole house adds to, dinner worked out from what is already in the cupboard, and the bottle to open with it.

The apps for the iPad that lives in the kitchen are Paprika, MusicPal, Bring!, Cooklist and CellarTracker. I built MusicPal; the other 4 are other developers’ apps.

MiaAppLog— an iOS developer who reviews other people’s apps
Published September 2026 · apps and prices last checked 13 October 2026

Four stars is my score for how well an app answers this moment. An app I built gets four and a half — that is a rule, not a comparison. The App Store’s own average is on each card beside it.

1. 

   Paprika

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · $4.99 · Food & Drink · App Store 4.9 (53,963)

   Save recipes from any website, then plan meals and build grocery lists.

   Skip it if you rely on support when sync or import breaks — long-time users report recipes going missing in sync, the built-in browser failing to import from some sites, and requests going unanswered.

   Official site ↗More lists with Paprika

   
2. 

   MusicPal Editor’s pick

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.5 · Free · Music · App Store 5.0 (2)

   A music player whose screen is just the song title and a running clock.

   App Store ↗More lists with MusicPal

   
3. 

   Bring!

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · Free · Productivity · App Store 4.8 (9,853)

   One shared grocery list the whole household can add to in real time.

   Official site ↗More lists with Bring!

   
4. 

   Cooklist

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · Free · Food & Drink · App Store 4.7 (11,338)

   Shows recipes you can cook with the food already in your pantry.

   Skip it if you want the price before you connect your loyalty cards — the annual fee turns up after sign-up, which is what reviewers repeat most.

   Official site ↗More lists with Cooklist

   
5. 

   CellarTracker

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · Free · Food & Drink · App Store 4.9 (13,112)

   Track the bottles in your wine cellar and pick what to open tonight.

   Skip it if you knew the old app: the rewrite is what nearly every recent one-star review is about, and some of the sorting people relied on did not survive it.

   Official site ↗More lists with CellarTracker

   

MusicPal is one of mine — everything else on this list is someone else’s app. How that works.