Handwritten, chalkboard and vertical menus are read more accurately: crossed-out and sold-out dishes are left out, prices written next to a currency sign are read correctly, and drinks with their own price are listed separately. Brand names keep their own name in translation instead of becoming a better-known brand, and a price that cannot be read for sure is left blank instead of guessed. Menus the phone cannot read as text, such as handwritten ones, no longer get stuck on “Still recognizing in the cloud”.

Menu scanning reads your photos directly again, not just the text the phone picks out, so handwritten, vertical and decorative-font menus are recognized much more completely. Photos are used only for recognition and never stored. If a scan finds no dishes, it no longer counts toward your scans. In Report a Problem, the description is now optional: you can send it with diagnostics alone.

A new iOS look: on iPhones with iOS 26 or later, the tab bar is the system Liquid Glass bar, and Settings puts what you use most at the top with one Light / Dark / Auto switch. Report a Problem lets you describe an issue, include diagnostics if you like, and send it from the app. Settings › Account now shows your service region, and you can switch between International and China mainland there without restarting. Switching only signs you out: your accounts and menus stay. When a feature isn't available in your region, its notice also lets you switch. With Share Usage Analytics on, a small share of sessions is now recorded as a screen recording with all text, photos and images hidden, to help us find bugs. On the China mainland service, Usage Statistics is a separate choice and off by default. You can turn either off in Settings › Privacy at any time.

ChefBear now opens on one calm screen, just its icon on the app background, and fades straight into the camera instead of flashing several screens. If you're signed in, ChefBear goes straight to your camera: the welcome page no longer flashes up while your account loads. The camera's loading message now appears only if the camera takes more than a second to start, so a quick start shows nothing extra.

Use ChefBear in ChatGPT and Claude: add it from Settings › AI connections with one tap on Add to ChatGPT or Add to Claude, see which assistants are connected and disconnect any of them. Approving a connection now shows the assistant's logo and what it can do, and confirms clearly once it's connected. Ask ChatGPT or Claude about any saved menu: in the menu's ⋯ menu, choose Ask ChatGPT about this menu or Ask Claude about this menu, and the assistant opens with the menu ready to read. ChefBear now copes better with weak or patchy connections: scans and cloud features retry safely and pick up again when your connection returns, without sending anything twice. Error messages now say what went wrong and what to do, with a reference you can give support, and ChefBear is more stable when you switch apps.

Invite friends from Settings › Invite friends: when a friend creates a ChefBear account with your link, you each get one month of Pro. New subscribers can also start the monthly plan with a discounted first month. The free plan now includes five times more: 150 dish images a week and 100 nutrition scans a month. Pro has no fixed limits, and signing in has a cleaner new design. Pro now stays with your account after updates and reinstalls. After a scan the menu stays on screen, dish photos start as each dish appears, and Recognize again re-reads a cloud menu.

ChefBear has a new look: Nibble, our plush chef cub, is on the app icon, waves hello when you start, and keeps you company on every loading screen. ChefBear is now in Claude's connector directory. Add it in Claude, or tap Add to Claude in Settings › Connected apps, then approve the connection in ChefBear with a 3-digit code. Approving a connection is quicker and clearer: the code allows it as soon as you type it, the keyboard never covers the buttons, and ChefBear tells you whether it was allowed, cancelled or ended and where to go back.

The long photo backup message is gone. How menu photos are backed up is now explained in the Terms of Use. If you signed in before this update, you'll be asked once to accept the updated Terms of Use. The guided tour on the sample menu now uses a hand-drawn arrow that points straight at the button to tap next.

Menus and selected dishes sync in the background, so cached menus open quickly and shared menus stay up to date. Dish images recover quietly after network interruptions and remain available across app updates. Dish selection pages use clearer titles and a simpler layout. Menu and history lists scroll smoothly, with clearer titles and better mixed-language recognition.

My Order now expands higher and keeps totals and actions clear of the home indicator, including in the sample menu. Dish photos now default to ChefBear standard style. Pro members can opt in to choosing image backgrounds. Online recommendations explain how each dish matches your preferences; phone sign-in uses the system numeric keyboard.

On iPad and other wide screens, both mainland and international phone sign-in now use a familiar three-column number pad with gentle tap feedback. Switching between mainland and international sign-in continues securely inside ChefBear, with automatic rollback if activation fails. Camera preview preserves the camera aspect ratio on wide screens instead of stretching the image.

Mainland China phone sign-in now changes the service region only after verification succeeds and continues seamlessly without reopening ChefBear. The phone form is now compact and keyboard-safe, accepts digits only, and combines legal consent into one clear row. Returning from sign-in now reliably restores the welcome screen instead of leaving its action button spinning.

Non-English menus now receive complete English names and explanations when ChefBear is used in English. Missing dish images now resume automatically after opening or returning to a menu, refreshing access, or changing restaurant settings. Transient image failures now recover with bounded backoff, preventing both stalled queues and wasteful repeated requests.

Fixed navigation after recognizing a menu again, preserving the three main tabs. Dish images resume automatically without waiting for the quota display to refresh. Improved recognition-session isolation and recovery when returning to the menu.

Account deletion now removes menus, orders, taste data, generated images, pending image requests, and orphaned caches after server confirmation. Registering again on the same device starts a completely fresh taste and sample-menu onboarding flow while keeping language, appearance, and camera preferences. Interrupted deletions resume safely on launch, and stronger identity boundaries prevent data or in-memory state from carrying between accounts.

ChefBear now recovers gracefully when app verification, subscription sync, or cloud services are slow, instead of leaving loading or image requests stuck. iCloud photos can finish downloading safely on weak connections, with bounded waiting, cancellation, and complete cleanup of partial files. Secondary pages now have a finger-tracked, cancellable edge swipe, while history, forced updates, and dish-image queues are more reliable and efficient.

Old ChefBear menus and taste preferences are now automatically assigned to your verified account, without repeated recovery prompts. Menus created before sign-in are safely adopted by the next account that signs in successfully, so new data is never left without an owner. Stronger account isolation prevents one account from claiming or deleting data that already belongs to another account.

Fixed the photo crop screen so every corner handle remains fully visible and easy to drag, including along the bottom edge. Improved cloud recognition reliability: ChefBear now keeps App Attest as the primary check and performs one secure compatibility retry when installation verification fails. Network, sign-in, and app-verification failures are now distinguished, with clear localized guidance instead of incorrectly reporting an online device as offline.

Refined the restaurant-type picker with balanced actions, a clearer footer, reliable safe-area spacing, and better small-screen scrolling.

A refreshed, more polished membership page that matches the Settings design. Monthly subscribers can now upgrade to yearly right inside the app, in one tap.

Fixed the freeze in Settings → Language. Picking a new language no longer locks up the UI mid-animation; the app updates the locale smoothly without rebuilding from scratch.

Fixed the freeze in Settings → Language. Picking a new language no longer locks up the UI mid-animation; the app updates the locale smoothly without rebuilding from scratch.

Picking a restaurant type after a scan now actually re-renders the dish photos in that style. The "Use this" button also sits comfortably above the home indicator instead of hugging the edge. Plus the earlier hot-fix that restored AI dish photo generation (the Grok Imagine endpoint regression).

Sharper menu and dish-photo scans — your first 20 scans each month (50 for Pro members) now run on our latest vision model for cleaner OCR on busy menus and low-light shots. Redeeming a ChefBear Pro code now opens the App Store's official redemption sheet, so any offer code lands with a single tap.

AI dish images now match the venue: pick fine dining, casual, fast food, or street food after a scan and the rendered photos use lighting, plating, and backgrounds that fit the restaurant. The first 15 weekly images for free users are also upgraded to 1024² high quality. The ChefBear Pro page consolidates image and nutrition-scan quotas into a single panel with live reset countdowns. Finishing the chef-bear.com UX survey now mints a one-month Pro code you can redeem in the app's Redeem dialog. Nutrition scans are more grounded too — the prompt now anchors estimates to common recipes instead of worst-case guesses. Plus a hotfix: Pro and own-key users now correctly receive the full premium endpoint output instead of standard thumbnails, and no longer see the upgrade prompt against the feature they pay for.