Mob App Review: What the Mob Kitchen App Does Well, and Where Olivi Fits In

In short: Mob or Olivi?

• Mob is a recipe library first. Every recipe is written and tested in its own kitchen, and new ones arrive every week.
• Its app turns those recipes into a weekly plan and a shopping list sorted by aisle, with portions you can scale up or down.
• Olivi starts from your recipes rather than a catalogue. You bring them in from websites, PDFs, photos, TikTok or YouTube, and Olive, its assistant, builds the week around your tastes, allergies and time.
• The Mob app is in English only. Olivi works in six languages and adapts units and vocabulary to the region you pick.
• Both keep your screen on while you cook. Olivi can also read the steps out loud.

What is Mob?

Mob started in 2016 and has grown from a recipe site into a proper cooking brand with its own app. Its ‘About’ page tells the story candidly: the early recipes were weekend cooking, the sort of generous food you make for friends, but the team realised people needed far more help with ordinary weekdays. So the focus moved to Monday to Friday, the breakfasts, packed lunches and dinners you have to produce when you are tired and out of ideas.

The app, called Mob: Meal Planner and Recipes, is published by Mouth Group Limited according to its App Store listing. It runs on iPhone and Android, with the website alongside it. When we checked on 15 September 2026, it had a 4.6 rating from around 4,100 reviews on the UK App Store, and 4.7 from roughly 1,500 reviews on Google Play, where it passes 100,000 downloads.

What can you do with the Mob app?

Quite a lot, as long as you are cooking Mob’s own recipes. Its help centre speaks of more than 4,000 recipes created and tested by its chefs, and makes a point of saying none of them are generated by AI. The website mentions over 3,000, so the exact count depends on the page you read. When you first open the app, you choose the kinds of meals you tend to cook, and it shapes what it shows you from there.

The app is arranged around four tabs. Discover is for browsing and filtering by ingredient or cooking time, with an Avoid filter to rule out anything you dislike. For You is a personalised feed. The Shopping List gathers the ingredients of every recipe you plan and updates when you change the number of servings, and you can slip in your own extras. Saved holds your favourites, organised into collections. Each recipe carries nutrition information and macros, and the step-by-step view keeps the screen awake while you cook. Mob also takes batch cooking seriously, with cook-ahead recipes that explain how to freeze and reheat.

What Mob does really well

• Consistency. Every recipe comes out of the same test kitchen, so the style, the measurements and the effort feel familiar from one dish to the next.
• A shopping list grouped aisle by aisle, filled from your plan in one tap, with room for household bits such as washing-up liquid.
• Batch cooking handled properly, with notes on freezing and reheating.
• Macros on every recipe, which helps if you keep an eye on protein.
• Plenty of weeknight variety: traybakes, curries, stir fries, packed lunches and breakfasts you can make ahead.

Where does Mob stop?

• It revolves around Mob’s own library. Its store listings and help centre describe planning with Mob recipes and say nothing about bringing in recipes from other websites, videos or your own notes.
• Plans come from Mob’s side: the ready-made meal plans on its website, or the recipes you pick yourself. Its listings do not mention an assistant you can talk to about your week.
• The app is only available in English.
• On sharing, the help centre suggests keeping your shopping list in your phone’s notes or ticking it off in the app while you shop. It does not describe a list shared live with the rest of the household.

Mob vs Olivi, feature by feature

Mob’s side of the table comes from its website, its help centre and its App Store and Google Play listings, all read on 15 September 2026. Where a feature is not mentioned, we say so rather than guess.

What does Olivi do differently?

The big difference is where the recipes come from. Olivi assumes your favourites are already scattered about: a blog you trust, a video you saved late one night, the lasagne your mum wrote on the back of an envelope. You can import a recipe from a link or a PDF, photograph a paper recipe, or paste a TikTok or YouTube link and let Olivi turn it into a tidy recipe card, credited to its creator, as the guide to importing videos explains.

Then there is Olive. Ask her for a week of dinners and she builds the plan with you, using your recipes or new ones she writes around your diet, your allergies and the time you actually have. She remembers what you like, so her suggestions sharpen as you go. The shopping list follows, sorted by aisle, and you can share it live with whoever does the food shop that week.

Olivi also adapts to where you cook: units and vocabulary follow the region you choose, and the nutrition facts are calculated from official food data rather than guessed. When it is time to cook, cooking mode goes full screen and reads each step aloud, which is rather handy with floury hands.

Planning a week of dinners from recipes you already love

Whichever app you settle on, the trick is the same: make fewer decisions on the night. Here is a week put together the way we would do it in Olivi, mixing a couple of saved favourites with quick dishes, and cooking once to eat twice.

• Plan the busy nights properly and leave one evening loose for leftovers or a change of heart.
• Build the list from the plan, not from memory, and keep it in aisle order so the food shop takes a single lap.
• Pick one batch dish a week and freeze it in portions.
• Keep a back-up dinner in the cupboard: tinned tomatoes, pasta and eggs have rescued many a Thursday.

Mob or Olivi: which one should you pick?

Pick Mob if you like the idea of a trusted test kitchen deciding what goes on the table, if you want macros front and centre, or if its style of weeknight cooking already suits your household. It is a polished app with a clear point of view.

Pick Olivi if your recipes live all over the place and you want them in one tidy home, if you would like help deciding what to cook rather than more recipes to scroll through, if you share the food shop with someone, or if your household cooks in more than one language.

How do you bring your recipes into Olivi?

Starting from scratch takes a few minutes. Olivi reads recipes from links, PDFs, photos and videos, and it can bring in a whole collection from another app in one go. The details are in the guide to moving your recipes from another app.

Good to know

• This comparison is written by the Olivi team. We have tried to be fair, including where Mob does better than we do.
• Mob’s features come from its website, its help centre and its App Store and Google Play listings, read on 15 September 2026. Apps change quickly, so have a look for yourself before you decide.
• Mob is a brand of its publisher, listed on the App Store as Mouth Group Limited. Olivi has no connection with it.