What’s new

• You can download The Saucery for iPhone from the App Store. There is no TestFlight invite to wait for any more: search for The Saucery on your iPhone, or use the App Store button on this site. If you were testing it, installing the App Store version replaces your test build and keeps your family, your recipes and your plan, because they live in your account rather than on the phone.
• Invitation and shared recipe links open the app. Tapping one on an iPhone with The Saucery installed now goes straight into the app instead of the website.
• Android is still in testing. Leave your Google account address on this site and we will send you an invite while it waits for Google Play.

• Say "next", "back" or "repeat" in Cook Mode and the step changes. On iPhone, turning on voice commands and saying a command often did nothing at all. On Android it heard one command and then stopped listening, or switched itself off after a few quiet seconds, while the switch still said it was on. Both now keep listening for as long as voice commands are on, and you can say "next" while a step is still being read aloud: the app leaves out the words it is reading itself and listens for yours.
• You can see that it is listening. A wisp of steam rises above the buttons at the bottom of the screen, next to the word Listening, and it swells when there is sound, so you can tell it can hear you. Under it are the words it heard, and for a moment after a command it says what it did, such as Next step. Tap it to see what you can say. With reduced motion on, it shows a still microphone instead.
• If voice commands cannot work, you are told why. Speech recognition turned off in Settings, no microphone access, or recognition that keeps failing now switch voice commands off with a message, rather than leaving them on and silent.
• Cook Mode reads steps aloud in a more natural voice. It used the most basic voice on the phone. Now it picks the best English voice you have, with an Australian or British accent where it can, and reads at a more natural pace.
• It reads what the recipe means, not what it abbreviates. "2 tbsp" is read as two tablespoons, "5-6 mins" as five to six minutes, and "200°C (180°C fan)" as 200 degrees, then 180 degrees fan.
• You can choose the voice. Cook Mode's menu has a Voice option listing the English voices on your phone, and picking one reads a line so you can hear it. If your phone only has basic voices, Cook Mode tells you where to download a better one. They are free. On iPhone and Android.
• Every recipe is on your phone, whole, for when you have no signal. Only some details were being kept, and the recipes on your home screen, the ones you open most, were the likeliest to come up offline without their ingredients or method. The app now keeps a full copy of every recipe, photos included, and catches it up whenever you open the app or come back online.
• The home screen works offline. Your pills, cards, this week's meals and the order you arranged them all stay put when you lose signal, instead of shrinking to a few rows of recipes. Tapping a pill, a card or See all shows its recipes from your phone. On Special is the one list that needs a connection, and it says so.
• You can arrange your home screen offline. Settings, then Home Screen, opens without a connection, and a change you make is kept on your phone and sent when you are back online. Resetting to the defaults still needs a connection.

• Each morning at eight, The Saucery tells you what is for dinner tonight, and tomorrow as well if it is planned. It used to tell you only when somebody else in the family changed the plan, which was often in the middle of the afternoon and never on a day nobody touched it. Now it arrives when there is still time to take something out of the freezer or add it to the shop. Everyone in the family gets it, whoever did the planning, each at eight on their own clock. A day with nothing planned for dinner sends nothing.
• It is on unless you turn it off. Settings, then Account, then Morning meal reminder. Turning it off only affects your phone, not anyone else in the family. On iPhone and Android.
• You hear when someone joins your family. Send an invitation and you get a notification when it is used, so you know they are in without having to ask.
• A day's notice before your free trial ends. Everyone in the family is told the day before, so the change does not arrive unannounced. Your recipes and meal plans stay either way.

• Leave Whisp part way through a reply and the note is still there when you come back. Locking the phone, switching apps or losing signal mid answer used to throw away whatever had not arrived yet, so the conversation came back with your question and nothing written under it. The Saucery now reads the note to the end and files it, whether you are watching or not.

• Importing a recipe now costs about two credits instead of about thirteen. Imports were the most heavily charged thing in the app and the cheapest one for us to run, which was backwards. Your daily allowance used to be worth about nineteen imports; it is worth closer to ninety. If you are just starting out and want to load in the recipes you already cook, that is the whole point of the change.
• There is now a monthly credit allowance as well as a daily one. The daily number is unchanged and still generous, so a big first weekend of importing and photographing will not run into anything. The monthly one sits well above what a household gets through in a month and exists so that a runaway loop cannot quietly cost us a fortune. You can see both in Settings, under AI Usage, and the message you get if you ever reach one tells you which allowance it was and when it comes back. On iPhone, Android and the website.
• A new book opens with two recipes in it. Granny's Lasagne and Olive's Chocolate Chip Cookies, both written out in full with their ingredients, their steps and their pictures. A brand new account used to land on an empty screen with nothing to look at, which is a poor way to see what the app does. Cook them, change them, or delete them.
• A category you chose to show stays on your Recipes screen even when nothing is in it. Put Favourites in your browse row and it used to vanish the moment you had no favourites, with no way to tell that apart from something being broken. It stays where you put it now: the pill keeps its place without a number, and a picture card keeps its picture and says "Nothing here yet". On iPhone, Android and the website.

• A recipe picture now costs 2 credits instead of 3. The drawing itself got about three times cheaper for us to make, so it costs you less of your daily allowance. Same 150 credits a day, more pictures in them.

• Write to support at support@thesaucery.nz. That is the address on the help centre and on your account page, and it is the address a reply comes back from.
• Contact support from your account page. Signed in on the website, there is now a way straight through to us from your account, with your name and email already filled in.
• Pulling the recipe list down to refresh no longer puts up an error. Refreshing with a search on screen could show a red bar reading “cancelled”, which was the app repeating, word for word, what it tells itself when it drops a request it no longer needs. The refresh now finishes and the list updates, and a dropped request says nothing at all. On iPhone and Android.

• Pick a new supermarket and its price graphs already have a year in them. Choosing a store nobody had shopped at before gave you its prices straight away and a flat line for every product, because there was no record of what anything had cost there before you arrived. The Saucery has been keeping that record in the background for every store in the country, so the graph now fills in the moment your store is set up.
• A year of prices, and the recent months in full detail. Every price change for the last six months, then a weekly low going back a year. That is enough to see whether a special is actually a special.

If you have made text bigger on your phone, The Saucery now grows with it.

• Every word in the app scales with your phone's text size. iPhone's Larger Text setting did nothing here: the words stayed the size they were while the icons beside them grew, which made screens look broken rather than merely stubborn. Titles, recipes, ingredients, your shopping list, Whisp's notes and the app's own headings now follow whatever size you have chosen, right up to the largest.
• Cook Mode is the one that matters, and it reads from across the bench. A step now sets at the size you asked for, so you can follow a recipe standing back from the phone with your hands full.
• Nothing gets cut off at the big sizes. Rows that used to squeeze a dish's name into four letters, or print a day as "Mo/n", now give the words the whole width and stack what used to sit beside them. Walked screen by screen at the largest setting on both phones.
• On Android too. Android already grew the text, but a few rows were too narrow to hold it. The week strip, the meal plan's dates and the badge captions now widen with the type.

Grocery prices used to mean Woolworths, and one set of prices for the whole country. Now there are three supermarkets, and you choose the shop you walk into.

• Pak’nSave and New World, as well as Woolworths. Open Settings → Price Lookup, pick your supermarket, then pick the store you actually shop at. Pak’nSave and New World set prices store by store, so a New World in one suburb can be dearer than the one two suburbs over. Woolworths charges the same everywhere, so there is only the one to choose. Still New Zealand only.
• Your list and your week price themselves against that shop. The specials on recipes and on the shopping list, the price history, the honest verdict on whether a “deal” is one, and asking Whisp what’s cheap this week all come from your store’s prices rather than a national average. Switch stores whenever you like; the prices catch up within a few minutes.
• Picking your store takes a moment instead of a minute. Every store in the country is in the list, grouped by supermarket with its suburb under its name. Search by name or suburb, or turn on Show stores near me and the three nearest are pinned at the top with the rest in order of distance. Say no to sharing your location and the list stays as it was. Your store, and a line like “prices from this morning”, sit at the top, so you know what your savings are based on.
• Set the country you shop in yourself. Which country you were in came from your phone, so a phone bought overseas, or set to another country’s English, left the store picker empty with no explanation. It now says price lookup is not supported in your region yet, and Settings → Account has a Region you can set. What you choose stays chosen, even when your phone disagrees, so signing in from a holiday no longer moves you.
• Pak’nSave deals read differently, and that is Pak’nSave. It doesn’t publish what a thing used to cost, so instead of a saving you’ll see its multibuys, two for $6 and so on. Nothing is missing; there is nothing there to show.
• Choose what goes on the shopping list. Tap the trolley on your meal plan and, instead of everything landing on the list at once, you get the week’s ingredients grouped under the meal each comes from, with a tick beside every one. Untick what’s already in the cupboard and add the rest. Add to Shopping List on a single recipe opens the same list, scaled to the servings you’re cooking for. On iPhone and Android.
• The day picker shows what is already planned. Adding a recipe to a day now says what each day already has, however far ahead it is, so you can see which nights are free.
• Postponing a meal frees the day it left. The meal moves rather than sitting on the old day marked “postponed”, so you can plan something else that night. On the day it moved to, it says which day it came from, so you know why its ingredients aren’t on this week’s shopping list. They were bought already.
• Postponing a meal from earlier in the week works. Postpone answered “Couldn’t postpone” on any meal whose day had already passed, which is most of the reason anyone reaches for it. The meal now moves to tomorrow. On iPhone it moves on a day rather than a whole week, the same as Android.
• Deleting your account now means it. A Saucery Pass subscription bought on the web is cancelled with the account instead of being charged on. (One bought in the App Store or on Google Play still has to be cancelled there, and we say so on the way out.) If you were the only person in your family, its recipes and photos, plans, lists and staples go too. If other people share it, everything you added stays where it is and stays usable.

• The home screen follows your arrangement. Pills, a carousel, then more pills is now exactly what you get. Before, whatever order you set in Customise your home screen, the screen drew all the pills, then all the picture cards, then all the carousels. On the phone and on the website.
• The website keeps you signed in. It used to sign you out after a couple of hours idle. It now keeps you for a month.
• A recipe opens on its pictures on the web. Every photograph sits at the top with the drawing, the way it does on the phone, instead of at the foot of the page under the comments. Click one to see it full size, and step between them with the arrow keys.
• The meal plan uses the screen. On a laptop, today is set out large and marked, with the rest of the week beside it in a column, instead of seven full-width rows down the middle of an empty page.
• Broken pictures on some older recipes are fixed. A handful were pointing their photographs at an address that no longer exists, so they came up blank. The pictures were never lost; they are back.

The first screen of the app is now yours to lay out, and it opens on your recipes rather than a row of buttons.

• Arrange it yourself. This week’s dinners, category pills, and carousels for favourites, recently added and quick dinners. Turn off what you don’t want; the ones you keep are the whole screen. The coming-up tiles carry each recipe’s own picture.
• A section can be a picture. A small drawing of what it is, two across the screen: a copper pan for your French recipes, a cake stand for Something Sweet. It is drawn once, and then everyone has it.
• Rearranging the week works again. Tap Rearrange above the meal plan and every day gets a handle. Shuffle dinners around, tap Done, and the week saves in one go. Drag Sunday’s dinner to Thursday and everything in between shifts up a night; Monday is still Monday. The old way, press and hold a meal and then drag, asked for a gesture the screen was already using to scroll, and it mostly did nothing.
• Postponing a meal works on Android. It had been quietly failing every time.
• Two notifications, and deliberately no others. Send a recipe in from the share sheet and put your phone away; the app tells you when it has finished reading it. And a reminder of the dinner you planned, for today or tomorrow.
• The web app keeps up on its own. Someone at the supermarket, someone at home: both see the shopping list move, without a refresh. Drag a dinner on your phone and the browser follows.

• Sign in with Apple or Google on the web, the same accounts the apps use.
• Manage your family from the account page. Invite someone, change what they can do, remove them.
• A new account starts at the beginning. Signing up on the web now walks you through setting up your family instead of dropping you on an empty page.