After lots of tinkering with the app, and having problems with losing bluetooth connectivity intermittently, I’ve concluded that the easiest and most reliable way to cook with the Anova is to ignore the app.
I simply stick my cooker into the pot, set the target temperature with the scroll wheel, and turn it on. Once it reaches target temperature, I get a beep. Now I drop my food into the water and set a timer on my phone, or start my kitchen egg timer, or set an alarm clock, whatever I like. (I don’t use the timer on the Anova itself because it is too cumbersome to set on the device with the silly press-and-hold for eight seconds thing, plus press-and-hold again for three seconds to restore the temperature units.)
Once my alarm clock goes off, I take the food out. Simple, effective, works every time, doesn’t need bluetooth or an app. All I need is the cooker and any kind of timer or alarm clock.
I get the distinct impression that entire bluetooth/wifi/app thing was never properly thought through. It is a far too complex a solution for a simple problem, namely, how to keep some food at X degrees for Y minutes.
With the app, we have this ultra-complicated answer that needs ultra high-tech networking such as bluetooth and wifi, that has to deal with all the complexity that this entails (such as how to securely tunnel into my internal wifi network from the outside internet), how to pair one or more phones with one or more cookers, how to restore connectivity if a phone goes to sleep and wakes up again (potentially with a different IP address assigned by DHCP), etc, etc, etc.
And, if I can use the cooker without an app, it means that I can still use the cooker if my phone has run out of battery, if I’ve accidentally left the phone on my desk at work on a Friday afternoon, if my phone has just developed a defect and I need to get it fixed, or if my home router suddenly has decided to have a hissy fit.
To me, the bluetooth/wifi/app idea is a solution in search of a problem. By all means, allow me to have an app that will automatically set time and temperature for a particular recipe, or a way to tell my cooker to start cooking while I’m still at the office at work. For some people, that is interesting and useful. But, if you want to have a device that is truly useful, give it a timer that can be set easily and quickly on the device itself, without the need to go through complex contortions of button presses.
In other words, make it easy to use the device without an app first. Then think about how to add value by having an app and all the extra bits. As is, the app adds more problems than it solves.
But it would be fun to control it from any computer or tablet. Without using the phone. Regardless of the OS.