Part Two: Going Vegan? Already One? There's an App for That!

So I downloaded some vegan-friendly iPhone apps recently. Technology being the friend that it is to us, I thought, "If my iPhone can function as a phone, computer and camera, why not take it a step further and let it help me pick my food choices?"

I narrowed my selections down to 16 from the 170 results I recieved when typing "vegan" into the App Store search bar. Part One of this series describes my criteria. Of the 16 I downloaded, I paid for 7 of them with a total bill coming to $14.77 after tax. This brought up a very valid question about how tax can be charged to a digital purchase, but I won't digress into that now.

For each app I will give a brief description as well as my thoughts about the nature of the program. I am also providing, as a reference only, the star rating each recieved from users in the App Store.

This is my list of the best apps in order from most to least useful:

1. Vegan YumYum Mobile (3.5 stars) - Obviously the fact that this app is linked to a very successful blog helps its chances of being useful. I found many of the recipes to be very appealing and the instructions are not complicated. One of the things I hate about vegan cookbooks is that some vegan cooks, especially the ones in hip Californian cities, tend to use unusual and sometimes strange ingredients that I am not always able to find, even in Ferndale. Vegan YumYum seems to have several recipes that use the normal kitchen items to make awesome food, like Pumpkin Whoopie Pies!
2. Happy Cow (5 stars) - A very close second (almost a tie for 1st) is the Happy Cow app. This website has always been helpful, but the app is even better. You can search using several different filters: zip code, GPS location, or address. Or you can search for vegan, vegetarian, or veg-friendly. It uses Google maps integrated into the app to display the results of your search and, as a result, you can select a restaurant or business and get address and phone number info as well as map location in the maps app so you can get directions. A great companion to the site.
3. 21-Day Vegan Kickstart (3.5 stars) -  This is a great vegan guide for day-to-day meals. Some of the recipes get a bit reused, but for the most part there are plenty of options and they are mostly simple recipes. After the first time you open the app, it begins the dietary program. You can't skip ahead to future meals, but you can see the progress you've already made. I am excited to try out the vegan rice pudding and the "facon bacon" looks good too. This app's primary purpose is lost to me but the recipes will be an excellent addition to my library of cookbooks.

A couple of other apps that I liked were Veg Quotes (5 stars), an inspirational app that provides famous quotes about an animal-product-free existence; Vegan Xpress (3.5 stars), a vegan shopping and menu guide; and Veggie Phrases (3.5 stars), a travel guide that translates phrases into different languages for eating vegan in different countries.

I also liked the Whole Foods recipe app (3.5 stars), despite the fact that it occasionally crashed and it seems like a marketing tool for the chain.

In the conclusion to this series, I will provide my rating for the worst three apps I tested. Stay tuned!

Part One: Going Vegan? Already One? There's an App for That!

First I will lay out the back story and the rules for this idea. To avoid making this post too long, I am splitting this experiment into several parts. I recently posted a blog entry about vegan Halloween candy and received many comments. A commenter mentioned that they would like to see a blog entry about the app that tells a person what is and isn't vegan. So I took the challenge and got on my iPhone.

I should warn anyone who hasn't already done this that just typing the word "vegan" into the search bar in the app store gets you 170 results. Many of the apps that come up after typing "vegan" are not even relevant to the subject, but isn't that true of many things you search for in the app store?

My rules were simple. I only looked at apps that seemed the most useful at a glance. I would gloss the description or base my decision solely off the title. I did not look at ratings or the number of stars an app received since I would be rating them myself. I went down the list until I got to a place where very few of the apps had anything to do with my intended goal.

Orcish Librarian was the first app that hinted I'd gone too far. As soon as I saw the title Animal Kill Counter, I quit looking.

Here are a couple of statistics and factoids that I found in my search:

• Ten of the first 25 apps are vegan/vegetarian recipe apps.
• Five of the first 25 apps are vegan/vegetarian restaurant finders.
• PETA has an app that pushes their ridiculous agenda right to your iPhone every day!
• There are three apps under the vegan search that run $9.99. The most I paid was $3.99 for Food Additives 2, one of the apps I was originally looking for.
• One of my favorite vegan cookbooks is for sale in its entirety for only $7.99.

My next installment will have my top rated apps and the final chapter of the trilogy will have the apps I found to be most useless or insulting to me as a vegan.