Devin Davies

Devin Davies is a New Zealand app developer best known as the creator of Crouton, a recipe manager and meal planner for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro. Crouton won the 2024 Apple Design Award for Interaction, making Davies the first New Zealander to win the award.

Davies is based in Christchurch. He worked as an iOS developer early in his career and taught himself Swift on the side while holding a full-time development job; in 2024 he was a software engineer at the Christchurch app studio Smudge. Programming was never his natural strength, he has said, but Swift clicked once he was using it to solve a real problem. A keen home cook, he had been planning his family's meals in the Notes app until it got out of hand.

He started Crouton in 2019 for himself and his family. The first version took about six months to build, and for roughly a year he and his mother were its main users. He kept shipping updates for several years until the app found its audience: recipes can be imported from websites, photographed out of cookbooks with VisionKit text recognition or typed in, and a cooking mode shows only the current step, its ingredients and built-in timers. Core ML models sort ingredients and quantities automatically.

Crouton was an App Store App of the Day in the US in 2023 and had passed 160,000 downloads by mid-2024, when Apple gave it the Interaction award at WWDC24. Davies was one of the first developers to bring a cooking app to Apple Vision Pro, and he has also built a Vision Pro game, Plate Smash. Crouton is free to download, with an optional subscription for extras such as AI import.

Davies is a clear example of a solo side-project developer reaching the top of Apple's design recognition by focusing relentlessly on what to leave out.