Scanning your coffee info just got easier with Brew Timer and iOS 15's Live Text

Brew Timer Scanning (Image credit: Stephen Panaro)

What you need to know

Brew Timer is a coffee tracking and recipe app that just gained support for iOS 15's Live Text.
Point your iPhone at a bag of coffee and the app can pull out text for saving.

Brew Timer was just updated to include support for iOS 15's Live Text, making it easier than ever to enter coffee data like brand, grind, and more. The updated app is available in the App Store and is a free upgrade for existing users.

For those unfamiliar, Live Text allows an iPhone's camera to look at something and identify the text. That could be in a photo you've already taken, or whatever the camera is currently looking at. That's where it comes into its own with Brew Timer — you can point your iPhone at a bag of coffee and have the app automatically recognize the text on its bag, ready for input.

Tracking which coffee beans you've tried is a great way to build your coffee knowledge. Unfortunately it often feels a bit tedious. That all changes today!Meet Bean Scanner: now you can use your camera to magically record all the nitty-gritty details from your coffee bag. By melding iOS 15's Live Text with Brew Timer's coffee smarts you can do this without typing a single word on your keyboard! Try it out, track your coffee, build your knowledge.

Other improvements include a new precision brew timer as well as a ton of fixes and smaller improvements that you can read in the App Store right now.

Want to take Brew Timer's new bean scanner for a spin? You can download it from the App Store right now for just $2.99. Live Text is one of the best iPhone features that apps are just beginning to make use of — and Brew Timer is right there with the best of them.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.