Food & coffee September 2026

5 apps for the meals you'll want to remember

A food app usually wants calories. These five want the meal: where you ate it, what was on the plate, the place you walked past and meant to try, and the recipe you would make again.

The apps for the meals you'll want to remember are Beli, YumPal, Mapstr, Pestle and CookShelf. I built YumPal; 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 6 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. 

   Beli

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · Free · Food & Drink · App Store 4.8 (17,290)

   Beli keeps ranked lists of everywhere you've actually been, plus where your friends ate and what they thought of it.

   Skip it if you do not want to invite your contacts; the features people came for are gated behind sending invitations, which is what most of the one-star reviews are about.

   Official site ↗More lists with Beli

   
2. 

   YumPal Editor’s pick

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.5 · Free · Food & Drink · App Store 5.0 (8)

   YumPal takes a photograph of the plate — that's the whole entry. It lands on a timeline by date, tagged by occasion, pinned to the place you ate it.

   App Store ↗More lists with YumPal

   
3. 

   Mapstr

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · Free · Travel · App Store 4.7 (2,590)

   Mapstr is one tap to save the bakery you walked past. Tag it, colour-code it, and send a friend a link that opens in any browser.

   Skip it if you have years of saved places — a subscription now caps how many you can keep, which is what turned long-time reviewers against it.

   Official site ↗More lists with Mapstr

   
4. 

   Pestle

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · Free · Food & Drink · App Store 4.7 (1,815)

   Pestle takes a recipe you share into it — a page, a video, anything — keeps only the ingredients and steps, then reads them back hands-free.

   Skip it if your recipes are on paper — the handwriting scanner is the weakest part by a distance, and it wants an account before you can try anything.

   Official site ↗More lists with Pestle

   
5. 

   CookShelf

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · Free · Food & Drink · App Store 4.6 (708)

   CookShelf searches the cookbooks already on your shelf by ingredient and tells you which book to open.

   Skip it if you expect to cook from it: it tells you which book to open rather than showing the recipe, and the free tier stops at five books.

   Official site ↗More lists with CookShelf

   

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