The short version

RecipeMemoir already meets or beats Paprika on recipe capture, organizing, the cooking experience (scaling, unit conversion, step timers, a real cook mode that keeps the screen awake), sync, export, and printing, and it adds an entire layer Paprika has nothing of: public /u/{handle} sites, AI commentary, nutrition rings with micronutrients, duplicate cleanup, and auto-categorizing. Paprika is a beloved but frozen filing cabinet (its last real feature was September 2023; 2026 releases are bug fixes only).

The gap is narrow and specific: the three "meal-management" things Paprika has and we don't, plus a short tail of recipe-fidelity details.

Feature-by-feature: Paprika vs RecipeMemoir

Everything marked Have or Exceed is done. The rest is the plan below.

Part 1 · Close the web gaps

All new features are per-user (collection-scoped) and gated exactly like today's schema, so they work for every beta tester's own site, not just yours. Order matters: grocery first (it is the destination the planner feeds), then the planner, then pantry, then the small fidelity items.

1. Grocery / shopping lists

Recipe → list with automatic aisle grouping (Produce, Dairy, Meat, and so on), quantity consolidation ("2 eggs" + "3 eggs" becomes "5 eggs"), check-off, manual items, and multiple lists. Reuses the ingredient parser we already have for scaling. A new shopping.html page plus an "Add to shopping list" button on every recipe.

2. Meal planning (calendar + reusable menus)

A week or month calendar you drag recipes onto, custom meal types, and reusable named menus you can stamp onto any week. The differentiator is one button, "send this week to a shopping list," that gathers every planned recipe's ingredients, scales them, consolidates, aisle-groups, and subtracts what's already in the pantry. That single connection is exactly what Paprika refuses to build.

3. Pantry / inventory

Track what's on hand with quantities, storage location, and expiration. Two things that beat Paprika: grocery lists automatically skip what you already have, and a small AI helper suggests recipes from your own collection that use what's about to expire (Paprika stores expiration dates but never suggests anything).

4. Recipe-fidelity tail

Small, independent additions to match Paprika's recipe richness: multiple photos per recipe and photos embedded in steps, links from one recipe to another, light bold/italic formatting, email-a-recipe, and print layouts for lists, menus, and plans.

Part 2 · The iOS app

Strategy: wrap the web app, don't rebuild it. The site is already a mobile-ready progressive web app. We put it in a thin native shell (Capacitor) that gives us the App Store, plus the handful of things a browser can't do. One web codebase then serves the website, iPhone, iPad, and Android. This is the fastest route to full Paprika parity because all of Part 1 is inherited for free.

How the native-only Paprika behaviors get covered:

• Clipping recipes: a native Share Extension, so "Send to RecipeMemoir" appears in Safari's share sheet from any page (better than Paprika's in-app browser).
• Timers: local notifications that fire even when the app is backgrounded.
• Cook mode: native keep-awake.
• Offline: the app caches your collection so browsing, searching, and cooking work with no signal.
• Grocery to Reminders: push a shopping list into iOS Reminders.

Beyond Paprika: Siri shortcuts for true hands-free timers, a home-screen widget for this week's plan or what's expiring, and optional Apple Health nutrition. Plus your two locked product requirements: user-selectable color themes (already themeable) and user-selectable app icons (iOS alternate icons, one per palette, pink as your default).

The offline and sync layer is also our answer to Paprika's data-loss reputation: cloud-backed by default, with a clear "keep mine / keep theirs" prompt if the same recipe is edited on two devices.

Part 3 · The Android app

Because it's the same Capacitor project, Android is largely free once iOS exists: the same web app, the same offline layer, just different platform plumbing. Clipping uses Android's share intent, timers use a foreground service so long timers survive battery-saver, and the icon picker uses adaptive icons. Then it's the Play Store submission and Play Billing.

Sequencing

1. Web parity first (grocery, then planner with the shopping-list connector, then pantry, then the fidelity tail). Because mobile wraps the web app, closing these on the web means both phone apps inherit them.
2. iOS second: native shell, then timers/cook mode, share extension, offline/sync, icons, the beyond-Paprika extras, then the store.
3. Android third: mostly re-targeting the same project plus the Play Store.

Net: after Part 1 the web app is at or beyond full Paprika parity. After Parts 2 and 3, RecipeMemoir is a Paprika-parity app on iPhone, iPad, and Android that also does everything Paprika never will, all from one shared codebase.