My wife and I have recently decided to remove Google from our lives, as much as is possible anyway. I do the grocery shopping, and I’ve kept a shopping list in Google Keep for years. Now I need a new app.
My two most important features of Google Keep:
I can edit the list on my desktop computer, then call it up on my phone when I’m at the store.
I can organize my list in any order I choose, item by item, and this order is saved and persists until I change it.
I looked around a bit online, and found a few apps that didn’t pass both of these tests. Then I came across Listonic, and thought I had found what I was looking for. But after using it for a couple of days, I found that every time I went back to the site, or opened the app on my phone, it was not preserving the order I had put my items in. This, despite the app’s claims that it would do this, and despite the fact that I have the ordering set to “custom.” I thought at first it was insisting on organizing by its internal categories first, so I created my own category and put everything in it. No dice, it still scrambles the order when I return to it.
So Listonic is out. Can anyone recommend an app that meets my two simple criteria?
How do you feel about Microsoft? My partner and I have been using their free todo app for years and it works great. We share it with each other and collaborate on different lists for groceries, trip planning, todos, etc. When we shop together, it lets us go to different parts of the store and check things off as we get them. It works on phones and computers, and as far as I can tell, the list items stay where you put them.
I have used Grosh, and I liked it. I haven’t used it for a few years and it may have changed. However, it doesn’t fit your 2nd criteria.
Having said that, if the reason you like your lists in a particular order is so they match aisle order at the store, that is exactly how Grosh works.
It effectively has two modes - when you are at home you can order everything by category (either your own or its built in categories). When you get to one of your usual stores (assuming you have them) it will re-order everything by aisle. You have to teach it what is where to some extent but if you shop consistently at certain places, and are prepared to put in a bit of time teaching the app where things are, it’s pretty good.
It has a lot more functionality. It will do stock management of your entire pantry. You can put in recipes and it will streamline the process of adding them to your shopping list. It does price management.
However, I didn’t bother with most of that and it works well just for organisation of lists.
We use Amazon’s smart speaker, Alexa. When you notice you’re out of something you just yell “Alexa, put garlic powder on the Trader Joe list”. Then when you go to TJ you look at the Alexa app on your phone to see what’s on the TJ list. Wonderfully efficient.
But it means selling your soul to Amazon, of course.
I use Any List and like it. You can use it on a PC or Mac via a web browser and, of course, on your phone. You can also sync your list with other users so you and your SO can have the same list so whoever gets to the store that day has the current shopping list with no fuss.
It has other features too (bar code scanner and some other stuff).
I hate Microsoft, and try not to use their products. The reason isn’t political, like with Google and Amazon, though. I just think everything they do is incredibly dumb.
Grosh and Anylist both claim to do the same thing as Listonic. I might try Grosh if I can’t get Listonic to work out. I’d rather not pay up front for Anylist (to use it on my PC), just to try it out.
I just fiddled with the settings in Listonic some more. I had previously turned off automatic sorting of their categories, but the main screen was still saying “sorting: automatic”. I went in the settings and confirmed that automatic sorting was unchecked. Then I tried dragging my custom category to the top of the list, and strangely, that seems to have fixed my issue. It now says “sorting: custom”, and it appears to be preserving my order. So I’ll use Listonic for a few more days and see how it goes.
FWIW Microsoft is a huge company (one of the hugest, I think?) and I would agree that like 80% of what they do is dumb. But some smaller niche products of theirs seem to fly under the radar (thankfully) and are rather excellent, like Todo, OneNote, their developer tools, etc.
These smaller products don’t get the mindshare of Windows or Office, and probably remain good because of that. When someone higher up notices them, they inevitably get enshittified.