Great hardware. Lousy software.
The Anova Precision Cooker makes great pork chops. Buy it, enjoy it, but dont plan to use the iPhone app.
Getting it set up was a truly lousy out-of-box experience. Something Id expect with a set of cheap knockoff speakers bought on a Shenzhen street corner, NOT a $180 brand-name device from Amazon.com.
Getting Bluetooth paired and then Wi-Fi enabled was such a miserable 45-minute slog that normal humans would have put the darned thing back in the box and returned it. It involved following the instructions, then following the advanced instructions, then randomly poking around like a chimpanzee on the flight deck with combinations of:
•turning the device on and off,
•turning my cellphone on and off,
•turning my Wi-Fi router on and off,
•choosing a different Wi-Fi network,
•pressing sequences of buttons on the Anova unit,
•force-quitting the app on my iPhone,
•deleting and reinstalling the app on my iPhone,
•physically carrying the device upstairs to be next to my router, and
•prayer.
Then when I wanted to add my wifes iPhone (nowhere does the company state that the device can only be paired with one phone at a time), I hit "unpair" and had to go through the whole beastly process all over again!!
(Note: if you cant pair Bluetooth, you cant get to the part of the app with the "Help" menu. Youre left to fend for yourself with Google. Thats just bad UX design.)
My home installation is vanilla: an Apple Airport Extreme 802.11n, running the current firmware 7.6.4. WPA2 Personal encryption. Two iPhones (one 6, one 6S) both running iOS 9.2.1.
Once everything worked, I discovered the app is simplistic to the point of being pointless. You cant actually "schedule" a cook... you can just press the "Start" button while youre someplace else. If that means the middle of the night... well, you can do it from the comfort of your bed rather than trekking to the kitchen, but you still have to wake up.
Great hardware. The software isnt ready for primetime.
stephenfleming about
Anova WI-FI